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...

By contrast with findings from the United States, Andrew Leigh finds no evidence that the gender of the first child has a significant impact on the decision to marry or divorce in Australia. However, among two-child families, parents with two children of the same sex are 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married than...

In 2003, part-time employment in Australia accounted for over 42 per cent of the Australian female workforce and nearly 17 per cent of the male workforce, and represented 28 per cent of total employment. Of the OECD countries, only the Netherlands has a higher proportion of working women employed part-time and Australia tops the OECD...

Alison Booth, Melvyn Coles and Xiaodong Gong show that there are increasing returns to education at the margin of labour market participation margin. They find that the issue the increasing returns to education will be most relevant for women or other people with large enough home productivity.

Under HECS former students with a debt face a sharp discontinuity. At the first repayment threshold they are required to repay a percentage of their entire income, resulting in an effective marginal tax rate that could be regarded as being as high as 76,000 percent. The authors formally model the taxpayer decision, and then use...