Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemGender Gaps in Early Educational Achievement(Springer Nature, 2017-10)This paper analyzes the source of the gender gap in third-grade numeracy and reading. We adopt an Oaxaca-Blinder approach and decompose the gender gap in educational achievement into endowment and response components. Our estimation relies on unusually rich panel data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children in which information on child development reported by parents and teachers is linked to each child’s results on a national, standardized achievement test. We find that girls in low- and middle-socio-economic-status (SES) families have an advantage in reading, while boys in high-SES families have an advantage in numeracy. Girls score higher on their third-grade reading tests in large part because they were more ready for school at age 4 and had better teacher-assessed literacy skills in kindergarten. Boys’ advantage in numeracy occurs because they achieve higher numeracy test scores than girls with the same education-related characteristics.
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ItemFrom substance use to homelessness or vice versa?(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2015-07)Homelessness is associated with substance use, but whether substance use precedes or follows homelessness is unclear. We investigate the nature of the relationship between homelessness and substance use using data from the unique Australian panel dataset Journeys Home collected in 4 surveys over the period from October 2011 to May 2013. Our data refer to 1325 individuals who were homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. We investigate dynamics in homelessness and substance use over the survey period. We find that the two are closely related: homeless individuals are more likely to be substance users and substance users are more likely to be homeless. These relationships, however, are predominantly driven by observed and unobserved individual characteristics which cause individuals to be both more likely to be homeless and to be substance users. Once we take these personal characteristics into account it seems that homelessness does not affect substance use, although we cannot rule out that alcohol use increases the probability that an individual becomes homeless. These overall relationships also hide some interesting heterogeneity by 'type' of homelessness.
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ItemTrust of second-generation immigrants: intergenerational transmission or cultural assimilation?(Springer New York LLC, 2014)This paper studies the respective influences of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home country and in the host country to separate the effect of cultural transmission from that of the social and economic conditions on individual trust. Our results indicate that trust in the home country contributes to the trust of second generation immigrants in both of the host countries, and marginally more in the United States. Social and economic conditions in the host country also affect individual trust.
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ItemIT-Based Technical Change and Job Instability(WILEY-BLACKWELL, 2016-01)Abstract We investigate the impact of IT diffusion on the stability of employment. We document the evolution of different components of job instability over a panel of 348 cities in France, from the mid‐1970s to the early 2000s. The evidence goes against the view that the diffusion of IT has spurred job instability. Yet, analysing long‐term differences in the occupational structure, we find that IT diffusion has increased the share of high‐skill occupations at the expense of low‐skill occupations. This is consistent with French firms' reliance on their internal labour market to meet the new skill requirements associated with IT diffusion.