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Background: In the Australian state of New South Wales nearly 60,000 approved applicants are waiting for social housing. Future Directions for Social Housing is a response to this challenge. This collection of housing programs aims to provide more social housing, support and incentives for leaving social housing and a better social housing experience. This document presents the protocol of the evaluation of these programs and the overarching Future Directions Strategy. Methods/Design: The evaluation will use a Type 1 effectiveness-implementation hybrid design, with an integrated, dual focus on assessing the effectiveness of Future Directions and better understanding the context for reform implementation. Program effectiveness will be examined using quasi-experimental techniques applied to linked administrative data. The implementation context will be examined via program level data, qualitative interviews and focus groups with stakeholders and tenants. Some quantitative survey and administrative data will also be used. Findings from the implementation evaluation will be used to inform and interpret the effectiveness evaluation. Economic evaluations will also be conducted. Discussion: This methodology will produce a high-quality evaluation of a large, complex government program which aims to facilitate rapid translational gains, real-time adoption of effective implementation strategies and generate actionable insights for policymakers.

This paper investigates how wage growth varies among Australian employees with different individual characteristics and job characteristics, and how the role of these characteristics has changed over the 2001-2018 period. The results show that after increasing between 2002 and 2007, wage growth had significantly slowed down post 2008, and particularly from 2013 onwards, returning to the levels of the early 2000s. Employees’ age, education, employment contract, occupation and industry explain a large share of differences in wage growth between individuals, and these characteristics are more important than aggregate business cycle effects. Conversely, the employee’s gender seems less important. Interestingly, the employee’s occupation is more important post-2008 than pre-2008, with managers and professionals experiencing substantially higher wage growth than others since 2014, whereas education was more important pre-2008. Finally, we find that casual employees receive a wage growth premium during the economic upturn and a penalty during the economic downturn.

Having a job is an important indicator of economic and social wellbeing, and two-earner families are becoming the norm rather than the exception. As a result, many more women, including mothers, are in the labour force now than ever before. Balancing family and work responsibilities therefore becomes ever more important, not just for women but also men who are sharing the caring load with their partners, especially when young pre-school children are present. However, employment is not equally distributed across families, and some families have noone in a job which leads to financial vulnerability. Even one-earner families that depend on a low-skilled, low-wage earner may struggle to get by and provide their children with the opportunities to succeed in life and achieve mental, physical and financial wellbeing. This may lead to the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and poor outcomes from parents to children. Gender inequality and ongoing inequalities relating to gender divisions in work and family may lead to women being particularly vulnerable in terms of earnings capacity and retirement savings when a relationship ends. One-parent families are specifically at risk as they often have no partner with whom to share the care-taking role, making work-family balance difficult to achieve. In this chapter we review the Australian evidence on these issues and provide policy implications.

Many women who give birth during their teenage years face lifetime disadvantages in health, social and economic domains. To develop effective policies to support these teenage mothers, it is important to understand how the disadvantage evolves over time to target the timing of any interventions. This paper focuses on health outcomes and seeks to determine the role of teenage motherhood and the likely channels through which teenage motherhood may contribute to health disparities across different life stages between teenage mothers and other women. Using household panel survey data and fixed-effects regressions that control for the effects of prior disadvantage, we show that teenage motherhood is negatively associated with all domains of health and that impacts worsen in later life stages. Potential mediators, including health behaviours, family, social support, education and economic factors are investigated and these partly explain mental health outcomes, reducing the direct impact of teenage motherhood, but not physical health. The strongest pathways are through social support, family and economic outcomes. Our results suggest boosting social support and addressing economic disadvantage may improve mental health outcomes for teenage mothers.

The introduction of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011 provides a rare opportunity to estimate the impacts of publicly funded paid leave on mothers in the first year postpartum. The almost universal coverage of the scheme, coupled with detailed survey data collected specifically for the scheme’s evaluation, means that eligibility for paid leave under the scheme can be plausibly taken as exogenous, following a standard propensity score-matching exercise. Consistent with much of the existing literature, the study finds a positive impact on mothers’ taking leave in the first half year and on mothers’ probability of returning to work in the first year. The paper provides new evidence of a positive impact on continuing in the same job under the same conditions, where previous conclusions have been mixed. Further, it shows that disadvantaged mothers–low income, less educated, without access to employer-funded leave–respond most. HIGHLIGHTS Studying the effects of introducing paid parental leave (PPL) in an advanced industrial country is important for the US, which is considering PPL. PPL was introduced in Australia in 201 l. Previously only 57 percent of 20–45-year-old women had access to paid parental leave provided by employers. Post-PPL, mothers initially return to work from leave more slowly than before, but after about six months of leave they return to work at a faster rate than pre-PPL. Post-PPL, the probability of returning to work within a year is higher than pre-PPL. PPL helps mothers balance paid work and family life and improves workplace attachment. Both effects are, on average, stronger among more disadvantaged groups.

We examine whether the COVID-19 crisis affects women and men differently in terms of employment, working hours, and hourly wages, and whether the effects are demand or supply driven. COVID-19 impacts are studied using administrative data on all Dutch employees up to December 2020, focussing on the national lockdowns and emergency childcare for essential workers in the Netherlands. First, the impact of COVID-19 is much larger for non-essential workers than for essential workers. Although female non-essential workers are more affected than male non-essential workers, on average, women and men are equally affected, because more women than men are essential workers. Second, the impact for partnered essential workers with young children, both men and women, is not larger than for others. Third, single-parent essential workers respond with relatively large reductions in labour supply, suggesting emergency childcare was insufficient for them. Overall, labour demand effects appear larger than labour supply effects.

We explore the impact of COVID-19 hotspots and regional lockdowns on the Dutch labour market. Using weekly administrative panel microdata for 50 per cent of Dutch employees until the end of March 2020, we study whether individual labour market outcomes, as measured by employment, working hours and hourly wages, were more strongly affected in provinces where COVID-19 confirmed cases, hospitalizations and mortality were relatively high. We do not observe a region-specific impact of COVID-19 on labour market outcomes. The results suggest individual characteristics are more important, including the employee’s age, type of contract and type of job. The evidence suggests that the decline of the labour market was all due to the impacts from the government-enforced lockdown and higher virus case numbers did not reinforce this decline. This suggests that preventive health measures should be at the regional level, isolating hotspots from low-risk areas.

Social bonds and supportive relationships (social support) are widely recognised as being indispensable to healthy psychological functioning and wellbeing. Applying a multilevel approach to the 2001-2016 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) data, we assess the impact of social support experienced by the parents during an individual’s childhood on the individual’s capacity to establish adequate social support in adult life. The level of social support experienced by the parents is measured during childhood/adolescence. Our findings show that, in addition to individual characteristics and other parental outcomes, the social support experienced by parents is an important predictor of the level of social support experienced by young adults. In particular, the mother’s social support is an important predictor of the level of social support experienced by young female adults, while the father’s social support is an important predictor of the level of social support experienced by young male adults. This evidence is further supported in an alternative specification based on sibling observations accounting for family fixed effects, finding that some individuals experience more social support when they are aged in their twenties than other individuals as a result of the family environment in childhood. In particular, social support experienced by parents explains about 16% of the initial family variance experienced by siblings.

We examine whether the COVID-19 crisis affects women and men differently in terms of employment, working hours and hourly wages outcomes, and whether the effects are demand or supply driven. COVID-19 impacts are studied using administrative data on all Dutch employees up to 30 June 2020, focussing on the national lockdown and the emergency childcare for essential workers in the Netherlands. First, we find that the impact of COVID-19 is much larger for non-essential workers than for essential workers. Although, on average, women and men are equally affected, female non-essential workers are more affected than male non-essential workers. Second, partnered individuals with young children are equally affected by the crisis as others, irrespective of gender and spousal employment. Third, single-parent essential workers experience relatively large negative labour supply effects, suggesting emergency childcare was not sufficient for this group. However, overall, labour demand effects appear more important than labour supply effects.

This paper from social policy experts at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Life Course Centre) identifies and examines a range of policy reform opportunities in Australia arising from COVID-19. Their analysis provides an optimistic, forward-looking counterpoint to what has undoubtedly been a catastrophic global event. The authors demonstrate how COVID-19 presents unique opportunities for rethinking and redesigning long-standing rules and regulations covering how people live and work in Australia, with some opportunities arising coincidentally and others requiring purposeful policy and institutional redesign. They present a broad range of ideas to address entrenched disadvantage in health, labour markets, the tax and transfer system, gender equality, education, housing and criminal justice in Australia, in order to leverage the COVID-19 crisis to build a better society.

Female labour force participation has increased tremendously since World War II in developed countries. Prior research provides piecemeal evidence identifying some drivers of change but largely fails to present a consistent story. Using a rare combination of data and modelling capacity available in Australia, we develop a new decomposition approach to explain rising female labour force participation since the mid-1990s. The approach allows us to identify, for the first time, the role of tax and transfer policy reforms as well as three other factors that have been shown to matter by earlier studies. These are (i) changes in real wages, (ii) population composition changes, and (iii) changes in labour supply preference parameters. A key result is that –despite the ongoing emphasis of public policy on improved work incentives for women in Australia and elsewhere– changes in financial incentives due to tax and transfer policy reforms have contributed relatively little to achieve these large increases in participation. Instead, the other three factors drive the increased female labour force participation.

We investigate patterns of childcare use and its influence on the cognitive development of Indigenous children. The influence of childcare on Indigenous children's cognitive outcomes is less well understood than for non-Indigenous children due to a lack of appropriate data. We focus on a cohort of Indigenous children in Australia who have been followed from infancy and for whom rich information on childcare use and cognitive outcomes is observed. Compared to Indigenous children who never participated in childcare, Indigenous children who participated in childcare performed better on several early cognitive outcomes. Using regression and propensity score matching, we show that this difference is driven by selection into childcare, with children from more advantaged families being more likely to attend formal childcare. However, matching analysis results suggest that relatively disadvantaged children might benefit more from attending childcare, as indicated by the positive estimated effects found for those who never attended childcare.

This paper investigates the factors influencing the allocation of time between public and private sectors by medical specialists. A discrete choice structural labour supply model is estimated, where specialists choose from a set of job packages that are characterized by the number of working hours in the public and private sectors. The results show that medical specialists respond to changes in earnings by reallocating working hours to the sector with relatively increased earnings, while leaving total working hours unchanged. The magnitudes of the own‐sector and cross‐sector hours elasticities fall in the range of 0.16–0.51. The labour supply response varies by gender, doctor’s age and medical specialty. Family circumstances such as the presence of young dependent children reduce the hours worked by female specialists but not male specialists.

This review is based on the international and Australian literature on paid parental leave. It does not aim to be exhaustive but focuses on the impact paid parental leave has on the labour force participation of mothers in developed countries. Four aspects of paid parental leave are explored, including the impacts of: introducing paid parental leave; changing the duration of existing paid parental leave; changing the generosity of existing paid parental leave payments; and paid paternity leave. It interprets the implications in the context of Australia, and includes descriptive information on the recent and current situation in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the early years of children in Australia. It discusses the inequality of opportunity as reflected in the statistics and the potential impacts of this inequality. A brief literature review is provided regarding the impact of formal childcare and preschool attendance on child development, with a specific focus on the impact for children from disadvantaged families. The article concludes with a discussion of possible policy directions to counteract the inequality of opportunity.

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we estimate how paid parental leave entitlements influence children's health up to age 7. Exploiting detailed information on children's health, family background, mothers' pre-birth work histories and mothers' health behaviours during pregnancy, we show that paid parental leave entitlements go together with a reduced probability of a child having multiple ongoing health conditions, but show no significant correlation with any single condition. We find that the reduction in multiple conditions is strongest for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Our study implies that the provision of paid parental leave for short periods is unlikely to substantially improve child health on average, but may potentially benefit the health of more disadvantaged children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the impact of COVID-19 hotspots and regional lockdowns on the Dutch labour market during the outbreak of COVID-19. Using weekly administrative panel microdata for 50 per cent of Dutch employees until the end of March 2020, we study whether individual labour market outcomes, as measured by employment, working hours and hourly wages, were more strongly affected in provinces where COVID-19 confirmed cases, hospitalizations and mortality were relatively high. The evidence suggests that labour market outcomes were negatively affected in all regions and local higher virus case numbers did not reinforce this decline. This suggests that preventive health measures should be at the regional level, isolating hotspots from low-risk areas.

This presentation showcases the innovative use of linked government administrative data in Australia to evaluate a range of diverse social interventions aimed at supporting vulnerable groups to achieve economic independence. The interventions were developed and funded as part of the Australian Priority Investment Approach to Welfare, an approach supported by actuarial analyses of administrative data designed to deliver targeted support for groups at-risk of long-term welfare dependence. In 2018, the Australian Government, commissioned an impact evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the approach in achieving its intended outcomes. The evaluation is based on analyses of linked administrative data to assess the extent to which the new interventions enabled pathways out of welfare dependence. Our presentation will outline the strengths and weaknesses of using government administrative data to evaluate the outcomes. Strengths include easy comparison across diverse programs designed to achieve the same goals; reduced respondent reporting burdens; robust quasi-experimental techniques such as a matching design based on exact matching on a few key characteristics and/or propensity score matching on a broad range of pre-program characteristics; and evidence-based investment practice decisions. Weaknesses include the adoption of an observational rather than experimental design and the lack of information on some social characteristics such as orientations to work, attitudes and social values. The presentation not only assesses the compilation of administrative data used for the first time to evaluate multi-program projects, it will also describe how these data feed into visual interactive dashboards used to monitor the outcomes of the interventions.

Relatively little is known about the dynamics of living in a jobless household at the individual level. We seek to fill this gap by using the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to estimate a dynamic random effects probit model of household joblessness. We find that state dependence clearly is an important factor in the persistence of household joblessness, as are a number of observed characteristics, while unobserved heterogeneity is also shown to play an important role. Interestingly, the results indicate that the degree of state dependence differs very little between individuals with different characteristics.

Despite substantial policy efforts to promote economic participation by Indigenous Australians, they continue to have low participation rates compared with non- Indigenous Australians. This study decomposes the gap in labour market attachment between Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians in non-remote areas, combining two separate data sources in a novel way to obtain access to richer information than was previously possible. It shows that among women over 90 per cent of the gap can be attributed to differences in the observed characteristics between the two populations. For men, the differences in observed characteristics can account for 44-52 per cent of the gap. A detailed decomposition shows that lower education, worse health, and larger families (particularly for women) explain the lower labour market attachment of Indigenous Australians to a substantial extent. Compared with previous studies, this study is able to explain a larger proportion of the gap in employment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and hence provides greater insights into important factors for 'Closing the gap' policies.

This paper investigates patterns of childcare use and their influence on the cognitive development of Indigenous children. The influence of childcare on the cognitive outcomes of Indigenous children is less well understood than for non-Indigenous children due to a lack of appropriate data. This paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, a unique panel survey that tracks two cohorts of Indigenous children in Australia. This paper focusses on the younger cohort that has been followed from infancy and includes rich information on their childcare use and cognitive outcomes. We find that, compared to Indigenous children who never participated in childcare, Indigenous children who participated in childcare performed better on a range of cognitive outcomes measured across the preschool years. Using regression and propensity score matching techniques we show that this difference is entirely driven by selection into childcare, with children from more advantaged families being more likely to attend formal childcare than children from less advantaged families. However, results from the matching analysis suggest that relatively disadvantaged children might benefit more from attending childcare, as indicated by the positive potential effects found for those who never attended childcare (i.e. the estimated effects had they participated in childcare).

This paper analyses doctors' supply of after-hours care, and how it is affected by personal and family circumstances as well as the earnings structure. We use detailed survey data from a large sample of Australian General Practitioners to estimate a structural, discrete-choice model of labour supply and after-hours care. This allows us to jointly model how many daytime-weekday hours a doctor works, and his or her probability of providing after-hours care. The underlying utility function varies across individual and family characteristics. We simulate labour supply responses to an increase in doctors' hourly earnings, both in a daytime-weekday setting and for after-hours care. Among doctors overall, men and women increase their daytime-weekday working hours if their hourly earnings in this setting increases, but only to a very small extent. Men's labour supply elasticities do not change if their family circumstances change, but for women the small behavioural response disappears completely if they have preschool-aged children. Doctors are somewhat more likely to provide after-hours care if their hourly earnings in that setting increases, but again the effect is very small and is only evident in some sub-groups. Moreover, higher earnings in weekday-daytime practice reduces the probability of providing after-hours care, particularly for men. Increasing doctors' earnings appears to be at best relatively ineffective in encouraging increased provision of after-hours care, and may even prove harmful if incentives are not well-targeted.

Objective: The objective of this study was to define an improved classification for allocating incentives to support the recruitment and retention of doctors in rural Australia. Design and setting: Geo-coded data (n=3636 general practitioners (GPs)) from the national Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life study were used to examine statistical variation in four professional indicators (total hours worked, public hospital work, on call after-hours and difficulty taking time off) and two non-professional indicators (partner employment and schooling opportunities) which are all known to be related to difficulties with recruitment and retention. Main outcome measures: The main outcome measure used for the study was an association of six sentinel indicators for GPs with practice location and population size of community. Results: Four distinct homogeneous population size groups were identified (0-5000, 5001-15000, 15001-50000 and >50000). Although geographical remoteness (measured using the Australian Standard Geographical Classification - Remoteness Areas (ASGC-RA)) was statistically associated with all six indicators (P

This paper extends the ‘top-down’ framework developed by Robilliard et al. (2001) to link a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to a microsimulation (MS) model. The proposed approach allows for the linking of an MS model to a dynamic (rather than static) CGE model. The approach relies on altering the sample weights in order to reproduce long-term population projections and changes in employment as estimated by the CGE model. The approach is applied to assess the effects of climate-change mitigation policies in Australia from 2005 to 2030 at five-yearly intervals.

Terence Chai Cheng, Anthony Scott, Sung-Hee Jeon, Guyonne Kalb, John Humphreys and Catherine Joyce

This paper presents a method of predicting individuals' welfare changes (compensating and equivalent variations) arising from a tax or social security policy change in the context of behavioural microsimulation modelling, where individuals can choose between a limited number of discrete hours of work. The method allows fully for the nonlinearity of the budget constraint facing each individual, the probabilistic nature of the labour supply model and the presence of unobserved heterogeneity in the estimation of preference functions. Yet it is relatively straightforward to implement. An advantage of welfare measures, compared with changes in net incomes, is that they take into account the value of leisure and home production. The method is applied to a hypothetical income tax policy change in Australia.

This article aims to describe the methods of the Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life (MABEL) survey and give a summary of responses. MABEL is a longitudinal panel survey of Australian doctors. The aim of this survey was to investigate factors that influenced workforce participation, labour supply, choice of medical specialty and workforce mobility.

Rural Australia continues to experience a chronic medical workforce shortage. For a variety of reasons, recruiting to and retaining medical professionals in many rural communities remain difficult. A place's amenity is often cited as a significant contributing factor towards the differential attractiveness of different rural and remote practice locations for doctors. This study investigates the extent to which there is an association between medical workforce shortage across rural Australia and a selection of place characteristics descriptive of their isolation, climate, and overall rural amenity. Our main outcome measure, District of Workforce Shortage (DWS) designation, has been employed for over a decade to identify areas eligible for incentive measures designed to overcome the chronic rural medical workforce shortage. Somewhat surprisingly, our study found only a weak association between DWS and our measure of rural amenity. In contrast, alternative measures of medical workforce shortage showed a moderate-to-strong association with rural amenity. The weak explanatory value of rural amenity may reflect the limitations of the DWS measure or the lesser significance of rural amenity compared with other professional aspects relating to where doctors take up practice. Findings from this study also suggest that the current DWS measure provides an inadequate basis for targeting recruitment and retention incentives. © 2011 The Authors. Geographical Research

This study examines whether the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who experienced teenage motherhood differ from the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who had their first child at an older age. We examine these factors across the lifetimes of both groups of women. A dynamic random effects probit model is applied to investigate the extent of state dependence in welfare participation while allowing for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity. We find evidence of state dependence for all women, but it is stronger for women who experienced teenage childbearing than for women who had a child at an older age. In addition, poor health is an important factor in increasing the probability of the welfare participation of women who experienced teenage childbearing.

Many of the Australian family support schemes are income-tested transfers, targeted towards the lower end of the income distribution, whereas the Norwegian approach is to provide subsidized non-parental care services and universal family payments. We contrast these two types of policies and discuss policy changes within these policy types by presenting results from simulations, using microsimulation models developed for Australia and Norway. Labor supply effects and distributional effects are discussed for the hypothetical policy changes of replacing the means-tested family payments of Australia by the Norwegian universal child benefit schedule and vice versa, and of reducing the childcare fees in both countries. The analysis highlights that the case for policy changes is restricted by the economic environment and the role of family policy in the two countries. Whereas there is considerable potential for increased labor supply of Australian mothers, it may have detrimental distributional effects and is likely to be costly. In Norway, mothers already have high labor supply and any adverse distributional effects of further labor supply incentives occur in an economy with low initial income dispersion. However, expenditure on family support is already high and the question is whether this should be further extended.

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the important issues relating to the labour supply of the primary carer in a household. Child care plays a central role in allowing the primary carer time away from the young children in a household. Therefore, child-care use is a central topic of this article, as well. There are a number of different aspects to child care, such as the price, quality, availability and type of service. This article discusses the analytical problems and challenges, taking Australian data, policy and experience as a focus, but drawing on a wide range of international empirical studies. It reports the results from previous research on child-care use and labour supply and it outlines the areas requiring more study. The focus of the article is on economic research. © 2009 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

This paper first analyses the demand for and cost of formal and informal childcare for couple and sole parent families, shedding light on factors which affect the demand for childcare. The predicted demand of formal childcare and the predicted costs of informal childcare arising from these models are then used to impute total childcare costs at different levels of labour supply.Based on data which are representative of the Australian population in 2002, this paper first analyses the demand for and cost of formal and informal childcare for couple and sole parent families, shedding light on factors which affect the demand for childcare. The predicted demand of formal childcare and the predicted costs of informal childcare arising from these models are then used to impute total childcare costs at different levels of labour supply. Finally, the predicted total costs are incorporated in the estimation procedure of structural labour supply models for couple and sole parent families. By making several extensions to the methodology adopted in Doiron and Kalb (2005a), who estimated similar models based on 1996 Australian data and which this paper largely replicates in terms of methodology, it is found that the average elasticities of labour supply with regard to the cost of childcare are quite similar to the earlier estimates. The elasticities remain at the lower end of the range found in the international literature with the exception of the elasticities for sole parents with preschool children and/or on relatively low wages.

A general international observation is that adolescents from disadvantaged families are more likely to leave school at age 16. In this paper we extend the literature on school-leaving decisions by using a new and extensive panel data set from New Zealand; and by examining the effect of family income, and personal and environmental characteristics since childhood on both academic performance and subsequent schooling choices. Results obtained from single equations and joint estimation, allowing for possible endogeneity of academic performance, reveal the importance of the role of academic performance in models of demand for education. Several factors that are at work for a long time, such as household income at different points in time, influence the school-leaving decision through academic performance. These results point to the role that stimulating academic performance can play in breaking cycles of disadvantage.

Few papers examine the pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of doctors’ labour supply despite substantial predicted shortages in many OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by applying both a structural discrete choice and a reduced-form approach. Using detailed survey data for Australian physicians, we examine how these different modelling approaches affect estimated wage elasticities at the intensive margin. We show that all modelling approaches predict small negative wage elasticities for male and female General Practitioners (GPs) and specialists. Our detailed subgroup analysis does not reveal particularly strong responses to wage increases by any specific group. We show that the translog and Box-Cox utility functions outperform the quadratic utility function. Exploiting the advantages of the structural discrete choice model, we examine short-term effects at the intensive margin by calculating labour supply changes in response to 5 and 10% wage increases. The results show that such wage increases substantially reduce the full-time equivalent supply of male GPs, and to a lesser extent of male specialists and female GPs, but not of female specialists.

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Children (LSAC), we contribute to the literature by estimating the effect of paid parental leave entitlements on child health up to age seven. Exploiting detailed information on children’s health, family background, mothers’ pre-birth work histories and mothers’ health behaviours during pregnancy within a propensity score matching framework, we show that paid parental leave entitlements reduce the probability of a child having multiple ongoing health conditions, but do not significantly affect any single condition. We find that the effect on multiple conditions is strongest for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Our study implies that the provision of paid parental leave, even for short periods (as usually available in Australia), will benefit children’s health.

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Children (LSAC), we contribute to the literature by estimating the effect of paid parental leave entitlements on child health up to age seven. Exploiting detailed information on children’s health, family background, mothers’ pre-birth work histories and mothers’ health behaviours during pregnancy within a propensity score matching framework, we show that paid parental leave entitlements reduce the probability of a child having multiple ongoing health conditions, but do not significantly affect any single condition. We find that the effect on multiple conditions is strongest for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Our study implies that the provision of paid parental leave, even for short periods (as usually available in Australia), will benefit children’s health.

This paper investigates the use of sample reweighting in a behavioural tax microsimulation model, to examine the implications for government taxes and expenditure of population ageing in Australia. First, a calibration approach to sample reweighting is described, producing new weights which achieve specified population totals for selected variables, subject to the constraint that there are minimal adjustments to the weights. Second, the performance of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) weights provided with the 2001 Survey of Income and Housing Cost (SIHC) was examined and it was found that reweighting does not improve the simulation outcomes for the 2001 situation, so the original ABS weights were retained for 2001. Third, the implications of changes in the age distribution of the population were examined, based on population projections to 2050. A ‘pure’ change in the age distribution was examined by keeping the aggregate population size fixed and changing only the relative frequencies in different age-gender groups. Finally, the effects of a policy change to benefit taper rates in Australia were compared for 2001 and 2050 population weights. It is suggested that this type of exercise provides an insight into the implications of changes in the population on government income tax revenue and social security expenditure, indicating likely pressures for policy changes.

This paper examines the effect of health on labour force participation using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The potential endogeneity of health, especially self-assessed health, in the labour force participation equation is addressed by estimating the health equation and the labour force participation equation simultaneously. Taking into account the correlation between the error terms in the two equations, the estimation is conducted separately for males aged 15-49, males aged 50-64, females aged 15-49 and females aged 50-60. The results indicate that better health increases the probability of labour force participation for all four groups. However, the effect is larger for the older groups and for women. As for the feedback effect, it is found that labour force participation has a significant positive impact on older females' health, and a significant negative effect on younger males' health. For younger females and older males, the impact of labour force participation on health is not significant. The null-hypothesis of exogeneity of health to labour force participation is rejected for all groups.

In tax microsimulation models which predict labour supply using a probabilistic discrete hours approach, the analysis of the distribution of income is difficult because, even for a small sample with a modest range of labour supply points, the range of possible combinations over the sample is extremely large. This paper demonstrates the use of a pseudo income distribution, where the probability of a particular labour supply value occurring (standardised by the population size) is used to refer to a particular position in the pseudo income distribution. The superior performance of the pseudo approach compared to using the expected income or taking few draws from the possible set of distributions is illustrated by a simulation example for sole parents in Australia, in which the whole social security system is abolished. The example shows further that even if sole parents could move freely into the labour force, they do not manage to compensate fully or even close to fully for their loss of income when no benefit payments are available.

Demands for formal and informal child care are estimated using a bivariate Tobit model. Predicted costs of child care are incorporated in the households' budget constraint and a discrete choice labour supply model is estimated. Separate models are estimated for couples and lone parents. Increases in the prices and costs of child care lead to reductions in labour supply for lone parents and partnered mothers. Results suggest the average elasticities in Australia are closer to those found in the UK and are smaller than the estimates for Canada and the US. Effects are stronger for single parents and mothers facing low wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator to examine the effects of changes to the social security and income tax system as introduced by the Australian New Tax System in July 2000. First this whole set of changes is studied, followed by a separate discussion of some of its components. From the results it is clear that the change in income tax rates and thresholds had the largest effect, because it affected a large proportion of the population whereas the changes to the benefit system were only relevant to smaller groups. Small labour supply responses are predicted to result from the reform, which lower the increase in expenditure (for singles the expectation is that the increase may even turn into a decrease) and lower the decrease in revenue. Overall, the labour supply responses are expected to reduce the cost of the reform. © 2005 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

This article uses the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator to examine the effects of a reduction in the means-tested benefit taper, or withdrawal, rates in Australia to 30 per cent. That is, all taper rates of 50 per cent and 70 per cent in the March 1998 benefit system are reduced to 30 per cent, while leaving all basic benefit levels unchanged. This change is therefore expected to ‘flatten’ the tax structure by reducing the high marginal tax rates applying to those with relatively low incomes and increasing the marginal tax rates of medium incomes. Simulations in which all individuals are assumed to remain at their pre-reform labour supply levels are compared with behavioural simulations in which the majority of individuals are free to adjust the number of hours worked. The results reflect only the supply side of the labour market. The database used is the 1997-98 Survey of Income and Housing Costs, so that weekly incomes are based on the financial year 1997-98. The comparison shows that, for sole parents, accounting for behavioural effects of the reform results in a lower estimated expenditure for government, whereas for couples, accounting for behavioural effects results in a higher estimated expenditure.

This paper investigates the determinants of juvenile delinquency for males and females using the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study. Ordered probit models for juvenile arrest are estimated separately for males and females. An adaptation of the EM-algorithm is used to estimate the model for females in order address a problem of missing values for the variable linking demographic and arrest data. The results indicate that juvenile arrests for both males and females are more likely for nonwhites and for those who leave education early. Males and females behave differently, in that males are more likely to be repeat offenders.