Publications
The efficiency of schools in Australia
This study examines the efficiency of schools in Australia and its determinants using the gain in NAPLAN test scores of students in 6,774 schools in 2009-2011. The results show that, based on empirical input-output combinations, the growth of NAPLAN test... Read article
Work ability, age and intention to leave aged care work
Aim To describe the work ability of mature age women workers in Australia’s aged care sector, and to explore the relationship between ageing, work ability and intention to leave. Method Logistic regression techniques were applied to a sample of 2721... Read article
WA Wine Exports: Building an Economic Future with China
Australian wine production has had a fair share of ups and downs in the past 10 years. More recently, overproduction, the high value of the dollar, and global competition from rapidly improving New World wine producers has strained the industry. Revenue has declined. Exports have softened. An... Read article
The labor market return to academic fraud
Academic fraud by undergraduate students is pervasive, but should it be taken seriously as an economic problem? Our research suggests so. Using a unique data set from the Caucasus, we estimate a large positive effect of academic fraud on the... Read article
Broadband and economic growth: a re-assessment
This study questions whether broadband network penetration a robust determinant of economic growth. For our preferred dynamic specification, penetration is statistically insignificant with speed (positively) and its interaction with penetration (negatively) impacting on growth. The negatively signed interaction term suggests... 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
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
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