Australian Journal of Labour Economics Volume 28 Number 2 is out now

Welcome to the latest issue of the Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE) Volume 28 No. 2.

We were saddened by the death of Russell Ross from the University of Sydney in August 2025. Russell had been a longtime supporter and contributor to labour economics in Australia and particularly to the Australian Labour Market Research Workshop. It is with deep gratitude to Bruce Chapman of the Australian National University, that we publish in this issue his obituary for Russell, which he delivered at the ALMR Workshop held in Canberra at the end of last year. Russell’s death will be a sad loss to the community of labour researchers and practitioners in Australia.

The contributed articles begin with the paper by Anita Staneva, of Griffith University and Garry Barrett, of University of Sydney titled ‘Do cognitive skills and personality traits contribute to a better understanding of gender pay disparities in Australia?’. They use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, to examine gender pay disparities in Australia beyond the importance of traditional economic variables. These additional factors are classified as cognitive skills, such as speed of information processing; and personality traits, such as extroversion and agreeableness. The findings suggest that public policies should pay more attention to programs to enhance these broader skills.

The last paper in this issue is by Bruce Chapman, Tim Higgins and Gaurav Khemka of the Australian National University entitled ‘Reforming HECS-HELP: Towards equity with repayment longevity and subsidies’ is on a very relevant policy topic, namely, the Jobs Ready Graduate Program (JRGP) “reforms” whereby fees and HECS-HELP repayments are linked to politicians’ perceptions of occupations regarding employability or “usefulness”. The changes under JRGP were extraordinary, particularly the very large increases in fees for humanities and the arts and large decreases for subjects such as mathematics, teaching and nursing. There is almost universal agreement among labour economists and other education experts about the folly of the JRGP but the policy is still in place. The methodology employed by the authors could be used to evaluate the effects of other pricing policies for university courses rather than ad hoc approaches such as the those of the JRGP.

The full Issue and the individual papers can be downloaded on the AJLE website.