Analysis of the intergenerational transmission of economic disadvantage and entrenched poverty is concerned with discovering the extent to which an individual’s socio-economic outcomes as an adult depend on the economic fortunes of his or her parents. This includes examining the level to which children who grew up in poor households perform worse in terms of educational attainment, labour market outcomes, health status and even life satisfaction and well-being, than their peers who grew up in better-off households. This report provides new empirical evidence that the length of time children live in households experiencing income-based disadvantage is a predictor of other forms of disadvantage experienced by early adulthood. This analysis explores the extent and structure of this form of intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, and especially entrenched income-based poverty, in Australia. The analysis draws on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to examine a cohort born between 1986 and 1992 over the 18-year period from 2001 to 2018. The HILDA Survey is a unique longitudinal dataset which is well suited to the study of the transmission of poverty across generations in Australia. This survey is nationally representative and contains rich information on individuals’ personal, family and household characteristics, economic circumstances educational outcomes and labour market activity, and furthermore allows us to match parents to their children. The results suggest that low household income during childhood is a key predictor of disadvantage in later life (as a young adult) and therefore an important indicator to guide policy interventions to break intergenerational cycles of disadvantage.

The past five years has seen a steady decline in private health insurance (PHI) membership in Australia. With rising premium prices and out-of-pocket costs, private healthcare has become increasingly unaffordable in an era of low wage growth. Given the private health sector relies heavily on PHI funding, this Research Insight explores how the decline in private health membership has affected the private hospital sector in Australia.

There is substantial cross-country evidence that binge drinking has significant social costs. In this study we add to the growing body of evidence on the association between problem drinking and antisocial and unlawful behaviours using data from the Australian National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) administered by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

How does socioeconomic status impacts one's health and their access to healthcare? Using records from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, this Research Insight classifies patients into four socioeconomic groups according to their use of health and human services. The study also measures hospital use and whether socioeconomic status with in-hospital adverse incidents. The author, Associate Professor Jongsay Yong suggests that hospital funding policy should account for patients' socioeconomic differences.

Australians experiencing high levels of financial stress and mental distress are not seeking needed health care. This study looks into what policies could help encourage greater use of necessary health care to improve wellbeing and avoid more expensive care later on.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant financial and mental distress for many Australians, which according to results from Taking the Pulse of the Nation in early June, has caused some to avoid visiting a health care professional when needed. As the pandemic continues, are people still delaying seeing a doctor or has their been a resurgence in visits after people delayed their care earlier in the year? In this Research Insight, Professor Yuting Zhang, Dr. Judith Liu, and Professor Anthony Scott examine Australians' use of health care and telehealth, focusing on what changes have occured since early June. To understand how COVID-19 has impacted decision-making around seeing a health care professional, data from Taking the Pulse of the Nation have been used to see who has avoided seeing a doctor, who has sought health care, and who has used telehealth.

Following the recent increase in private health insurance (PHI) premiums in October, as well as people's growing financial and mental stresses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Australians may be wondering whether they should drop or downgrade their PHI. In this Research Insight, authors Professor Yuting Zhang, Dr Judith Liu, and Professor Anthony Scott examine how Australians have changed their PHI memberships during the pandemic. Using data from the Melbourne Institute's Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey, they look specifically at who has dropped, downgraded or upgraded their PHI since March 2020.

The economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent restrictions has had an alarming effect on Australians' mental health. Particularly worrying is the increase in high mental distress among parents, especially among non-employed fathers and parents of primary school aged children. Financial stress and work-family conflict tend to be the two major sources of mental distress for parents. Using data from the Melbourne Institute's Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this Research Insight examines the surge in mental distress in parents compared to pre-COVID. The study identifies who has been most impacted, looking at how it impacts mothers and fathers, and how employment status and the age of the child can influence mental distress.

Of the close to 5 million parents with children under 18 in Australia, 24 percent have reported high rates of mental distress since the start of the pandemic. This has persisted well beyond the end of local lockdowns.

We use data from the Familias en Acción program in Colombia to examine the spillover or indirect effects of a conditional cash transfer program. Our results show that the program has significant spillover effects: it leads to an improvement in the health of non-targeted individuals in treatment households in terms of both incidence and severity of illness. The benefits are stronger for women and the elderly in the short run and for men in the medium run. Our analysis suggests that these spillovers are driven by increased access to information in the household that creates a public good.

The share of women in the top 1% of the UK’s income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, fitted separately for men and women, in order to contrast between the sexes the role of changes in characteristics and changes in returns to characteristics. We show that the rise of women in the top 1% is primarily accounted for by their greater increases (relative to men) in the number of years spent in full-time education. Although most top income analysis uses tax return data, we derive our findings taking advantage of the much more extensive information about personal characteristics that is available in survey data. Our use of survey data requires justification given survey under-coverage of top incomes. Providing this justification is our second contribution.

Many countries impose job search requirements as a condition of unemployment benefit receipt, but there is relatively little evidence on the efficacy of these requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 and 2003 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, providing an opportunity to identify their effects on welfare receipt. Using this quasi-experimental design and administrative data, we find negative effects on welfare receipt for the mature-age partnered women targeted by the reforms. We also find large negative effects on welfare receipt of their partners, suggesting family labour supply decisions were considerably affected.