Improving cognitive skills of young children has been suggested as a possible strategy for equalising opportunities across racial groups. Using data on 4-5 year olds in the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children, the authors focus on two cognitive tests: the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the ‘Who Am I?’ test (WAI). They estimate the...

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.

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...

Using an improved version of the neoclassical labour-supply model, Robert Breunig, Deborah A. Cobb-Clark and Xiaodong Gong analyse the expected impact of the 2005-06 Australian tax reform. They calculate working hours to increase by 1.7 per cent for both men and women and household after-tax incomes to increase by approximately $60 per week on average...