A distinctive feature of the Australian labour market is a high incidence of casual employment. Almost 27 percent of Australian employees in 2006 were classified as employed on a casual basis, an alarmingly high proportion given the strong claims often made about the harmful effects that casual...

Working hours in Australia are quite widely distributed around the population mean. That is, there are relatively many people working both relatively short hours and relatively long hours each week. From a welfare perspective, however, it is not the actual number of hours worked that is of...

We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and...

We introduce the ideas of “drop ceilings”, that full-time employees who switch to reduced hours thereafter face an hours ceiling such that a return to full-time employment is difficult, and of “trap-door floors”, that full-time employees may be denied the opportunity to reduce their...

The accepted view among psychologists and, increasingly, economists is that household income has statistically significant but only small effects on measures of subjective well-being. Income, however, is clearly an imperfect measure of the economic circumstances of households. Using data drawn...

The 1990s has seen bargaining, and more specifically, enterprising bargaining supplant arbitration as the dominant industrial relations paradigm. In large part, this change reflects widespread belief that enterprise bargaining would stimulate greater levels of productivity. Evidence in support...

It is widely assumed that since income is usually found to account for a relatively small proportion of the variance across individuals in self-reported well-being, money does not matter for personal happiness. This hypothesis is re-examined in this paper by including measures of household...

This article uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (or HILDA) Survey to examine the extent to which the relatively high rates of transition from low-paid employment into unemployment are the result of disadvantageous personal characteristics or are...

Using panel survey data from Australia, we divide long hours workers (persons reporting usually working 50 or more hours per week) into groups of 'volunteers', who prefer long hours, and 'conscripts', who do not. We study both the static and dynamic prevalence of the phenomenon. Norms...