Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAge penalties and take-up of private health insurance(Melbourne Institute, 2021-12-01)Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based mandate, and whether this has changed over time. The mandate creates discontinuities in the incentive to insure by age, which we exploit to estimate causal effects. People who do not insure before the penalty dates face higher premiums in the future, which should encourage them to bring forward purchases. We find that people respond as expected to the initial age-penalty, but not to subsequent penalties. The 2% premium loading results in a 1-4% increase in take-up, with effects increasing after an annual government letter campaign that reminds people approaching the penalty deadline about the policy. We discuss the impact of the mandate on the overall efficiency of the market, and implications of potential reforms.
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ItemBridging Classical and Revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory Research: A Longitudinal Analysis of a Large Population Study(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2021-12-20)The reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) proposes that neurobiological systems mediate protective and appetitive behaviours and the functioning of these systems is associated to personality traits. In this manner, the RST is a link between neuroscience, behaviour, and personality. The theory evolved to the present revised version describing three systems: fight-flight-freezing, behavioural approach/activation (BAS), and behavioural inhibition (BIS). However, the most widely available measure of the theory, the BIS/BAS scales, only investigates two systems. Using a large longitudinal community survey, we found that the BIS/BAS scales can be re-structured to investigate the three systems of the theory with a BIS scale, three BAS scales, and a separate fight-flight-freezing system (FFFS) scale. The re-structured scales were age, sex, and longitudinally invariant, and associations with personality and mental health measures followed theoretical expectations and previously published associations. The proposed framework can be used to investigate behavioural choices influencing physical and mental health and bridge historical with contemporary research.
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ItemESSAYS ON WAR, FORCED DISPLACEMENT,HIV, AND EDUCATION( 2020)The field of Economics has benefited from the great improvements in data collection we have witnessed during the last decade. We now have within our reach datasets with high precision and frequency. The availability of higher frequency data allowed for a shift from cross-sectional data to panel data—same cross-section over time. Using panel data the researcher observes the same unit of analysis over time. The main advantage is that if researchers observe then same units over time, they can control for unobserved characteristics that while unknown, can be understood not to have much variation over time. In the recent years, data with precise geographical information is allowing researchers to merge previously unrelated datasets using geographical location. The data limitations of the past are being tackled by the development of methods addressing the unknown, and new data availability—and computing power—that allows us to enrich our data by merging it with data coming from all types of sources. The first chapter of this thesis uses panel data where the unit of analysis is a 2 mile by 2 mile square observed over two years to study forced displacement as a response to conflict in Iraq. Chapter 2 uses the exact geographical location of households in Rwanda, conflict during the 1994 genocide, and other geographical features to document the prevalence of wartime rape during the genocide in HIV levels a decade later. Chapter 3 uses a panel of schools in Spain to assess the impact of a bilingual education system on student learning outcomes. Chapter 1 studies how internally displaced persons reacted as a response to violent conflict in Iraq during the war against ISIL between 2014 and 2017. I develop a network model that accommodates new data with exact geographical coordinates. The data on IDPs and conflict has a large spacetime variation that can be exploited by the estimation model. I contribute to fill the existing gap in the conflict literature regarding internally displaced persons by answering the following questions: How far from conflict do IDPs go? Where do IDPs shelter? How does conflict increase the probability of a location to host IDPs? How does conflict accumulate to trigger displacement? The highest concentration of IDPs is found within 2 miles of conflict and decreases with distance, disappearing beyond 40 miles. IDPs tend to cluster in highly populated areas, within 5 miles of a main road. Non-diverse ethno-religious areas host fewer IDPs relative to areas without a clear ethno-religious majority. An extra conflict event within 2 miles increases the probability of a grid cell to host IDPs by 30%. Forced displacement is triggered by conflict accumulating for two weeks at most. Chapter 2 finds empirical evidence of wartime rape during the Rwandan genocide. I use HIV data 10 years after the genocide as a measure of the prevalence of rape to find that HIV levels in 2005 can be explained by the intensity of the genocide in the different Rwandan districts. The findings document both the prevalence of rape- usually stigmatized and hard to measure- and its dire lasting effects on the Rwandan population long after the crimes were committed. To establish causality, I exploit the exogenous variation in the accessibility to households during the genocide. I measure accessibility in terms of the distance from these households to the main roads, the rainfall over those roads during the genocide, and terrain ruggedness. Chapter 3 analyses the impact of a bilingual education program aiming promote students’ language proficiency and communicative competence in a language other than their own. Nowadays, bilingual programs are present worldwide responding to an increasing demand partially driven by the potential personal and economic benefits from being proficient in a foreign language. However, bilingual education increases the difficulty of learning academic content due to it being taught in a non-native language. To measure the importance of this effect, I utilize standardized test data and the Spanish-English bilingual program of Madrid. The findings show a small but significant negative impact of the program on the performance of students in English-taught content. The negative effect is stronger around the median of the student’s ability distribution.
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ItemYoung-adult compared to adolescent onset of regular cannabis use: A 20-year prospective cohort study of later consequences(WILEY, 2021-05)INTRODUCTION: This paper compares consequences of cannabis use initiated after high school with those of cannabis initiation in adolescence, with estimates of the proportion of adverse consequences accounted for by adult-onset and adolescent-onset cannabis users. METHODS: A state-representative sample in Victoria, Australia (n = 1792) participated in a 10-wave longitudinal study and was followed from age 15 to 35 years. Exposure variable: Patterns of cannabis use across 20 years. Outcomes at age 35: Alcohol use, smoking, illicit drug use, relationship status, financial hardship, depression, anxiety and employment status. RESULTS: Substantially more participants (13.6%) initiated regular use after high school (young-adult onset) than in adolescence (7.7%, adolescent onset). By the mid-30s, both young-adult and adolescent-onset regular users were more likely than minimal/non-users (63.5%) to have used other illicit drugs (odds ratio [OR] > 20.4), be a high-risk alcohol drinker (OR > 3.7), smoked daily (OR > 7.2) and less likely to be in relationships (OR < 0.4). As the prevalence of the young-adult-onset group was nearly double of the adolescent-onset group, it accounted for a higher proportion of adverse consequences than the adolescent-onset group. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Cannabis users who began regular use in their teens had poorer later life outcomes than non-using peers. The larger group who began regular cannabis use after leaving high school accounted for most cannabis-related harms in adulthood. Given the legalisation of cannabis use in an increasing number of jurisdictions, we should increasingly expect harms from cannabis use to lie in those commencing use in young adulthood.
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ItemHow does working nonstandard hours impact psychological resources important for parental functioning? Evidence from an Australian longitudinal cohort study(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2021-12)This study investigates the link between nonstandard schedules and three psychological resources salient to working parents' parental functioning (psychological distress, work-family conflict and relationship quality). Data from fathers and mothers are analysed separately, using a nationally representative sample of dual-earner parents (6190 observations from 1915 couples) drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). The LSAC data was collected between 2008 and 2018 (with data collected every two years). Hybrid analysis models were conducted to identify within-person changes in these psychological resources in association with moving in and out of nonstandard work schedules, as well as between-person differences between parents working standard hours and nonstandard hours. The results indicate that the connections between working nonstandard schedules and the psychological resources were patterned differently across genders. No significant differences in psychological distress were found between those working nonstandard schedules and those working standard schedules for either fathers or mothers. Fathers working nonstandard schedules had higher work-family conflict compared to fathers working standard schedules, while no such effect found for mothers. This effect for fathers was largely explained by other characteristics related to working a nonstandard schedule, rather than the schedule itself. For fathers (but not mothers), working nonstandard schedules was significantly, and potentially causally, associated with lower relationship quality (i.e. within-person effects were found). Additional supplementary analyses found the connections between work schedules and psychological resources varied somewhat across different types of schedules (i.e. evening/night shift, rotating shift and irregular shift). As one of the first nationally representative longitudinal studies to explore changes in work schedules in association with changes in parents' psychosocial resources, the impacts for fathers (particularly relationship quality) are an important line for future enquiry.
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ItemEnergy poverty and its relationship with health: empirical evidence on the dynamics of energy poverty and poor health in Australia.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021)Does poor health increase the likelihood of energy poverty or vice versa creating a vicious poverty trap? We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) survey from 2005-2018 to explore if these two processes are dynamically related across a number of subjective and objective measures of physical and mental health as well as subjective and objective measures of energy poverty. We employ univariate dynamic models, introduce controls for initial conditions, and explore inter-dependence between energy poverty and health using a dynamic bivariate probit model. Our results show that controlling for initial conditions impacts on the magnitude and significance of the lagged coefficients. We only find cross-dependency effects between energy poverty and health for subjective measures of energy poverty. This suggests that individuals' feelings about being in energy poverty may impact on their health leading to poor health/energy poverty traps. Targeting individuals in financial stress/debt may be one way to reduce these poor health/energy poverty traps.
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ItemEffects of BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine on COVID-19 infection and hospitalisation amongst older people: matched case control study for England(BMC, 2021-10-18)BACKGROUND: The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine has been shown to be effective at preventing serious COVID-19 events in clinical trials. There is less evidence on effectiveness in real-world settings, especially for older people. Here, we aimed to estimate vaccine effectiveness in the context of the rapid NHS mass-vaccination programme in England, exploiting age-based vaccination eligibility thresholds to minimise and correct for selection bias. METHODS: We studied 170,226 individuals between the ages of 80 and 83 years from community settings outside care homes who received one dose of BNT162b2 mRNA between the 15 and 20 December 2020 and were scheduled a second dose 21 days later. We matched these vaccine recipients to slightly younger (aged 76-79 years) persons not yet eligible to receive the vaccine on gender, area of residence, area deprivation, health status, living arrangements, acute illness, and history of seasonal flu vaccination. We compared their rates of COVID-19 positivity and hospitalisation in the subsequent 45 days. We adjusted for the increasing concentration of COVID-19 positivity in the control population caused by the requirement to have no COVID-19 symptoms prior to vaccination. RESULTS: Emergency hospital admissions were 51.0% (95% confidence interval 19.9 to 69.5%) lower and positive COVID-19 tests were 55.2% (40.8 to 66.8%) lower for vaccinated individuals compared to matched controls 21 to 27 days after first vaccination. Emergency admissions were 75.6% (52.8 to 87.6%) lower, and positive COVID-19 tests were 70.1% (55.1 to 80.1%) lower 35 to 41 days after first vaccination when 79% of participants had received a second dose within 26 days of their first dose. CONCLUSIONS: Receipt of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine is effective at reducing COVID-19 hospitalisations and infections. The nationwide vaccination of older adults in England with the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine reduced the burden of COVID-19.
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ItemAre Broad-Based Vouchers an Effective Way to Support Life-Long Learning? Evidence from an Australian Reform(SPRINGER, 2021-11)Increasing mature-age access to education and training in a way that is responsive to changing labour market needs is a key policy challenge. In this paper we examine the impacts of a unique reform in the Australian state of Victoria that aimed to meet this challenge by introducing a broad-based voucher for those 25 and older. In effect, the reform uncapped public course-level funding and linked it to individual student choice instead of centralised funding allocations. Using national administrative enrolment data and difference-in-differences estimation, exploiting the continuation of existing centralised funding models in other states, we find that the voucher increased mature-age vocational education and training participation and improved the alignment of course enrolments with measures of prevailing skill needs, including enrolments of disadvantaged groups. Our study provides first evidence on the use of broad-based vouchers in vocational education and training to expand access to mature-age learning in a demand-responsive way. These results provide support for policies that put student choice at the centre of efforts to lift mature-age access to training, which is especially important for countries, such as the United States, that have traditionally funded vocational education and training through centralised allocations.
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ItemThe Impact of Paid Parental Leave on Labor Supply and Employment Outcomes in Australia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-07-02)The introduction of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011 provides a rare opportunity to estimate the impacts of publicly funded paid leave on mothers in the first year postpartum. The almost universal coverage of the scheme, coupled with detailed survey data collected specifically for the scheme’s evaluation, means that eligibility for paid leave under the scheme can be plausibly taken as exogenous, following a standard propensity score-matching exercise. Consistent with much of the existing literature, the study finds a positive impact on mothers’ taking leave in the first half year and on mothers’ probability of returning to work in the first year. The paper provides new evidence of a positive impact on continuing in the same job under the same conditions, where previous conclusions have been mixed. Further, it shows that disadvantaged mothers – low income, less educated, without access to employer-funded leave – respond most.