How much do non-medical factors affect the timing of conceptions, births and deaths? To test this, Joshua S. Gans and Andrew Leigh estimate the effect of the millennium on conceptions, births and deaths. With a highly flexible empirical specification, they find large and significant increases in conceptions and births, and suggestive evidence of an effect...

Abstract: International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia...

In 1979, Australia abolished federal inheritance taxes. Using daily deaths data, Joshua S. Gans and Andrew Leigh show that approximately 50 deaths were shifted from the week before the abolition to the week after (amounting to over half of those who would have been eligible to pay the tax). Their results imply that over the...

It is well understood that government policies can distort behaviour. But what is less often recognized is the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions. We study one such “introduction effect”, using evidence from a unique policy change in Australia. In 2004, the Australian government announced that children born on or after...

This paper by Prem Jung Thapa and Tue Gørgens extends the traditional static focus of research on the labour market assimilation of migrants in Australia by analyzing the dynamics of job search and actual time taken to find the first job after arrival in Australia. The Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA) covers two...