Publications
Measuring Small Area Inequality Using Spatial Microsimulation
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
Underemployment among mature age workers in Australia
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
A zero-inflated regression model for grouped data
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
The impact of maternal mental health shocks on child health
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
Occupational segregation and women’s job satisfaction
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
Housing older Australians: Loss of homeownership and pathways into housing assistance
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
Beyond the Bottom Line: Government debt in Australia
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
Survey self-assessments, reporting behaviour and the use of externally collected vignettes
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
Securing our Future
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
Elephant poaching & ivory trafficking problems in Sub-Saharan Africa: An application of O’Hara’s principles of political economy
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
The evolution of the gender test score gap through seventh grade
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
Care roles and employment decision-making
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