Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemOptimal employee turnover rate: theory and evidence( 2002-10)This paper investigates the quantitative effects of employee turnover on firms' productivity.The Australian Business Longitudinal Survey 1995-98, a unique survey providing firm level data on both production and employee turnover, is used as the data source. Theoretical studies have advocated that firm specific human capital and job matching to be the two major, but competing, mechanisms through which turnover affects productivity. Our results indicate that the effect of job matching dominates when turnover is"low," while the effect of firm specific human capital dominates when turnover is"high." We identify that the optimal turnover rate - the rate that maximises productivity, controlling for other factors - is about 0.3, well in excess of the sample mean. The finding suggests that further increasing the flexibility of employment arrangement for small and medium Australian enterprises could yield substantial productivity gains.
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ItemOptimal employee turnover rate: theory and evidence( 2002-10)This paper investigates the quantitative effects of employee turnover on firms' productivity. The Australian Business Longitudinal Survey 1995-98, a unique survey providing firm level data on both production and employee turnover, is used as the data source. Theoretical studies have advocated that firm specific human capital and job matching to be the two major, but competing, mechanisms through which turnover affects productivity. Our results indicate that the effect of job matching dominates when turnover is"low," while the effect of firm specific human capital dominates when turnover is"high." We identify that the optimal turnover rate - the rate that maximises productivity, controlling for other factors - is about 0.3, well in excess of the sample mean. The finding suggests that further increasing the flexibility of employment arrangement for small and medium Australian enterprises could yield substantial productivity gains
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ItemThe negative inflation-growth effect: theory and evidence(Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, 2001)
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ItemSimulating the Behavioural Effects of Welfare Reforms Among Sole Parents in Australia( 2001-06)This paper derives and estimates an econometric model of labour supply among sole parents in Australia, using modelling techniques which treat the labour supply decision as a utility maximising choice between a given number of discrete states. In estimation, we control for random preference heterogeneity as well as fixed and search costs. Using our econometric model, we look at the effects of actual and hypothetical welfare policy reforms on the employment choices of sole parents in Australia. The microsimulation results presented in this paper use the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS), developed at Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.
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ItemIntransigencies in the labour supply choice( 2002-09)There have been significant recent advances in the estimation of labour supply models. Here the hours continuum is split into a number of discrete options and the preferred choice obtained as the solution to a constrained utility maximisation problem. However, the underlying probabilities of an individual being in a particular hours state, are assumed to be those given by standard Logit-type ones. As is well known, such a specification embodies the underlying Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property, which is likely to be violated in a model of labour supply choices. Moreover, if such models are used in microsimulation, they implicitly assume that individuals are able to change their observed hours state at the margin following a policy reform. This paper suggests an alternative general (non-IIA) specification for these probabilities, which can additionally incorporate the fact that: individuals may be captive to certain choices (for example, due to institutional reasons). Moreover, this model has the benefit that when used for microsimulation, the reform has to work harder to coax individuals out of the captive hours states. The results suggest that, for sole parents, the Logit model is misspecified and there is a significant amount of captivity, most notably to full-time employment hours. The effect of such captivity on microsimulation is illustrated by considering a range of actual and hypothetical policy reform