Publications

Measuring Small Area Inequality Using Spatial Microsimulation Riyana Miranti, Rebecca Cassells, Yogi Vidyattama, Justine McNamara Measuring income inequality has long been of interest in applied social and economic research in the OECD countries including Australia. This includes measuring income inequality at the regional level. In this article, we have used spatial microsimulation techniques to calculate... Read article 1 December 2015Journal Articles Read More
Underemployment among mature age workers in Australia Jinjing Li, Alan Duncan, Riyana Miranti Underemployment is a serious and pervasive problem both in terms of its impact on those individuals affected, and for the economy as a whole. Underemployment is associated with job insecurity, increased casualisation and lower savings, and from a macroeconomic standpoint,... Read article 1 December 2015Journal Articles Read More
A zero-inflated regression model for grouped data Sarah Brown, Alan Duncan, Mark Harris, Jennifer Roberts, Karl Taylor We introduce the (panel) zero-inflated interval regression (ZIIR) model, which is ideally suited when data are in the form of groups, and there is an ‘excess’ of zero observations. We apply our new modelling framework to the analysis of visits... Read article 1 December 2015Journal Articles Read More
The impact of maternal mental health shocks on child health Huong Thu Le, Ha Nguyen This paper contributes to an emerging body of literature on intergenerational transmission in health by presenting the first causal estimates on the impact of maternal mental health shocks on child health. The potential endogeneity of maternal mental health shocks is... Read article 1 December 2015Working Papers Read More
Occupational segregation and women’s job satisfaction Michael Dockery, Sandra Buchler Data on men and women’s job satisfaction conditional upon the degree of feminisation of their occupation are used to explore potential causes and implications of occupational segregation by gender in the Australian labour market. We find some evidence for the... Read article 1 December 2015Working Papers Read More
Housing older Australians: Loss of homeownership and pathways into housing assistance Rachel Ong ViforJ, Gavin Wood, Val Colic-Peisker In Australia and other ‘homeownership societies’ it has been conventional to think of housing pathways in terms of a smooth linear progression, leading to outright ownership in middle age and a retirement buffered by low housing costs. This vision of... Read article 1 December 2015Journal Articles Read More
Beyond the Bottom Line: Government debt in Australia Rebecca Cassells, Alan Duncan, John Phillimore, Yashar Tarverdi Beyond the Bottom Line is the third report in the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre’s Focus on the States series. The report examines the highly topical and politically sensitive subject of government debt in Australia and seeks to provide a balanced... Read article 26 November 2015Focus on The States Read More
Survey self-assessments, reporting behaviour and the use of externally collected vignettes Mark Harris, Rachel Knott, Paula Lorgelly, Nigel Rice The anchoring vignette approach has grown in popularity as a method to adjust for reporting heterogeneity in subjective self-reports, removing bias due to systematic variation in reporting styles across study respondents. The use of anchoring vignettes, however, has been limited to surveys where... Read article 23 November 2015Working Papers Read More
Securing our Future Michael Dockery, Alan Duncan, Ha Nguyen, Rachel Ong ViforJ Western Australia’s population is growing older. The median age of West Australians is set to increase from 36 years today to 40 years by 2050. During that time the proportion of West Australians aged 65 and over is projected to... Read article 18 November 2015Focus on WA Read More
Elephant poaching & ivory trafficking problems in Sub-Saharan Africa: An application of O’Hara’s principles of political economy Andrew John Brennan, Jaslin Kalsi This paper examines the complex social problem of African elephant decimation using a political economy approach. This paper applies five principles of O’Hara’s political economy (POPE): historical specificity; circular and cumulative causation; uneven development; heterogeneous agents; and contradiction. POPE provides a practical tool... Read article 18 November 2015Journal Articles Read More
The evolution of the gender test score gap through seventh grade Ha Nguyen This paper documents the patterns and examines the factors contributing to a gender test score gap in five test subjects in early seventh grade of schooling using a recent and nationally representative panel of Australian children. Regression results indicate that... Read article 2 November 2015Working Papers Read More
Care roles and employment decision-making Therese Jefferson, Gill Lewin, Rachel Ong ViforJ, Rhonda Sharp This article uses data from a panel of Australian mature-age women to examine the effects of care roles on workers’ intentions to leave their jobs. We focus on how the employment effects of care roles can be shaped by the... Read article 1 November 2015Journal Articles Read More