Chancellery 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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ItemThe Australian industrial relations reform agenda(Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne, 2005)
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ItemModelling Longitudinal Survey Response: The Experience of the HILDA Survey(Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc (ACSPRI), 2006)
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ItemThe dynamics of income poverty in Australia: Evidence from the First Three Waves of the HILDA Survey(Australia Council of Social Service, 2005)This paper reports an analysis of income poverty dynamics in Australia using longitudinal data from the first three waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. As in other developed countries, far fewer people are found to be living in persistent poverty than are poor on an annual basis. With a poverty threshold set at 50 per cent of median equivalised income, just over four per cent of Australians were measured as being in income poverty in all three waves. Among those who were poor during 2000‐01, about half subsequently had incomes above the 50 per cent threshold. However, the longer people remained in poverty, the less likely they were to exit, the greater was their risk of re‐entering poverty, and the lower were their incomes if they temporarily escaped poverty.
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ItemHousehold wealth in Australia: its components, distribution and correlates(Sage Publications, 2005)Using data from the second wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, conducted in 2002, this article provides information on the composition, distribution and correlates of the wealth holdings of Australian households. The survey results indicate that Australian households have an average net worth (or wealth) of just over A$400,000, comprising assets of $473,000 and debts of $68,000. The largest component of wealth is home equity. The degree of inequality across households in wealth inequality is found to be much larger than the inequality in income and varies substantially with age and, to a lesser extent, with household type and education. Age, socio-economic background, educational attainment, marital status and the number of children can account for about 30 percent of the variation across households in (logged) wealth.
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ItemThe effects of wealth and income on subjective well-being and ill-being(WILEY, 2004-09)The accepted view among psychologists and, increasingly, economists is that household income has statistically significant but only small effects on measures of subjective well‐being. Income, however, is clearly an imperfect measure of the economic circumstances of households. Using data drawn from the 2002 wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this paper demonstrates that wealth, which can be viewed as providing a degree of economic security, is at least as important to well‐being and ill‐being as income.