Crunching official data helps evaluate policies. Potential embarrassment is the wrong reason for governments to keep it under wraps, Warwick McKibbin and Robert Breunig write.

This paper explores risk aversion among Australian households using panel data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Using households’ share of risky assets, we test whether relative risk aversion is constant in wealth.

We examine Australia's Mature Age Worker Tax offset (MAWTO), a targeted earned income tax credit of up to $500 to incentivize participation of older workers that existed from 2004-05 to 2014-15. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that MAWTO increased labor market participation by around 0.5 percentage points. For women only, it had a small...

Measurement error in the constructed price of child care can explain why previous Australian studies have found partnered women's labour supply to be unresponsive to child care prices. Through improved data and improved construction of the child care price variable, we find child care price elasticities that are statistically significant, negative and in line with...

Using data in which both partners report about household finances to, Robert Breunig, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Xiaodong Gong and Danielle Venn demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. This implies that standard surveys which collect information about the household’s financial position from a representative individual...