The paper is a collection of three reports on the costs of children in Australian families: 'The estimated costs of children in Australian families in 2005-06'; 'Updated costs of children using Australian budget standards; and 'Costs of children and equivalence scales: a review of methodological...

This report presents the results of the evaluation of the short-run impacts of the Communities for Children (CfC) initiative on child, family and community outcomes. The study was based on a three-wave longitudinal study of 2,202 families living in 10 sites that had a CfC program and five sites...

The paper examines how the use of child care, the time parents spend with children, and parental wellbeing relate to parental employment. The analysis in this paper is based on Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children (LSAC) confidentialised unit record file. Four themes are...

One important and under-researched aspect of labour market policy is the extent to which policy interventions are effective in modifying job search behaviour. Furthermore, there is little extant research on whether certain job search behaviours lead to labour market success. Our analysis uses...

Over the last twenty years there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of lone mothers employed part-time, while the proportion employed full-time is much the same in 2002 as it was in 1983. The experience of couple mothers is quite different, with both full-time and part-time...

As the populations in many countries age, the direct financial costs to governments are expected to rise due to the income support and health costs associated with an older population. A focus on these financial costs has led to an unduly negative, problem-oriented view of population ageing that...

This paper analyses the incidence and impact of unemployment among young Australians. It is argued that the scale and seriousness of the current youth problem are often overstated. There is no evidence that the aggregate unemployment experience of young Australians has changed over the last two...

One of the major economic and social changes of recent decades has been the large increase in the number of mothers in paid employment. As a consequence, there has been increasing recognition by employers of the importance of family-friendly work arrangements to assist parents to balance work...