This paper outlines Australia's experience with labour market programs since 1973 and uses existing information to assess the effectiveness of the programs, especially those which are designed to assist the unemployed, wage subsidies and direct job creation.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on racial and ethnic tension by analyzing the relationship between local socio-economic conditions and the propensity for outsiders to have threatening racial encounters with insiders. The authors use unique data for a sample of active-duty Army personnel that allowed them to first, link personnel to the local communities...

The relationship between income inequality and national savings is theoretically ambiguous, and past empirical studies have delivered mixed results. The authors of this paper revisit the question using a newly available source of data on inequality: the income share of the richest 10 percent and the richest 1 percent. Combining this with historical data on...

The authors of this paper model the determinants of who makes decisions, the principal or an agent, when there are multiple decisions. Decision making takes effort and time; and, once implemented, the expected loss from a particular decision (or project) increases with the length of time since the last decision was made. The model shows...

Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this research indicates that unobserved heterogeneity substantially biases cross-sectional estimates of union wage effects upward for both males and females. Estimates of the union wage premium for male workers between the ages of 25 and 64 fall from 8.7 percent to 5.2...