Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemFamily Structure, Usual and Preferred Working Hours, and Egalitarianism in Australia( 2004-02)Data from a representative survey of adult Australians are analysed for usual and preferred working time across family types. We discover a time divide regardless of gender and family type: many short hours individuals desire longer hours of employment, while many long hours individuals prefer shorter hours. The latter group is larger such that the average employee desires fewer hours across family types, with the exception of lone mothers. For dual-earner couples with children, men average approximately 20 hours more per week than women, a difference that would only decline to 18 hours per week if preferred hours were realized. However, approximately one-fifth of these couples exhibited egalitarian or nearly equal working hours. Egalitarian couples averaged a combined 84 hours per week of employment, tended to share the care of children, were more likely to be non-Australian born, and included marked numbers of women holding degrees and in professional occupations.
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ItemInvestigating the role of neighbourhood characteristics in determining life satisfaction( 2003-09)This paper reports on an analysis of life satisfaction data collected as part of the first wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. More specifically, the clustered nature of the HILDA sample was used to test the role of neighbourhood effects in accounting for inter-personal differences in self-reported life satisfaction scores.A regression model predicting individual differences in life satisfaction was developed and tested for men and women separately. When this model was estimated allowing for fixed neighbourhood effects (based on the Census Collection District in which a sample member resides), strong support for sizeable effects were found. Indeed, observable individual and household characteristics (such as age, sex, employment status and household income) were only found to account for about 12 to 14 per cent of the variation in measured life satisfaction. Of the vvariance unexplained, close to 10 per cent could be accounted for by unobserved differences across neighbourhoods. While identifying the presence and magnitude of neighbourhood effects proved to be relatively straightforward, determining the source of these neighbourhood differences is a very different matter. Essentially, these neighbourhood effects can arise either because individuals in the same neighbourhood tend to behave similarly because they face similar environments or have similar characteristics, or because the behaviour of individuals is affected by the behaviour of other residents of the neighbourhood. Some evidence was uncovered to suggest that the latter type of effect might be relatively more powerful in explaining differences in life satisfaction. Unfortunately, this conclusion is tentative at best, with measurable neighbourhood characteristics only found to have a relatively small impact on the overall explanatory power of the regression models
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ItemEnterprise Bargaining and Productivity:Evidence from the Business Longitudinal Survey( 2001-07)The 1990s has seen bargaining, and more specifically, enterprising bargaining supplant arbitration as the dominant industrial relations paradigm. In large part, this change reflects widespread belief that enterprise bargaining would stimulate greater levels of productivity. Evidence in support of this link between enterprise bargaining and productivity, however, is both scant and unconvincing. In this paper the relationship between enterprise bargaining and productivity is revisited using data from the Business Longitudinal Study. This data source is unique in that it provides firm-level data for Australia where the individual firms are tracked over a four-year period. Further, the survey period commenced in 1994-95, which is ideal for studying the impacts of the emerging growth in enterprise agreement coverage. Finally, the BLS data provide an objective measure of value added output. Estimation of a simple production function using a random effects model revealed evidence of a strong contemporaneous relationship between registered enterprise agreements and productivity. Indeed, firms where all employees are on such agreements are estimated to have productivity levels that are 8.8 per cent higher than comparable firms but where no employees are covered by an enterprise agreement and are forced instead to rely on conditions specified in an industry award. However, despite this finding, it still proved impossible to establish a direct causal relationship between the introduction of enterprise agreements and subsequent productivity growth.