Publications
Housing Affordability in WA: A tale of two tenures
This report by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre focuses on housing affordability and features findings from the fourth BCEC Housing Affordability Survey of 4,000 households across Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. This fifteenth report in BCEC’s Focus on WA... Read article
Relationships between metropolitan, satellite and regional city size, spatial context and economic productivity
This report, funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), considers evidence about the existence and scale of agglomeration economies, including in Australian cities. Agglomeration economies are inherently complex in terms of how they interact with city size... Read article
Presentation: Housing Affordability in WA: A tale of two tenures presentation
View the presentation slides given by John Curtin Distinguished Professor Alan Duncan Director, Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, and Dr Amity James, Deputy Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute – Curtin Research Centre, at the launch of the Housing Affordability in... Read article
The role of conflict in sex discrimination: the case of missing girls
Conflicts between ethnic groups can threaten group survival and exacerbate son preference in conformity with the traditional role of men as group defenders. We study the impact of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region on the subnational variation of... Read article
BCEC Quarterly Economic Commentary – June 2021
This Western Australia Quarterly Economic Commentary analyses the most recent data on economic and social indicators for WA. WA’s economy continues to strengthen Western Australia’s domestic economic output, also known as State Final Demand, increased by 3 per cent over the March... Read article
Foreign aid and the quality of economic institutions
Identification of the causal effect that foreign aid has on the quality of institutions in recipient countries has been elusive in the aid effectiveness literature. The main reason is that aid is endogenous with respect to the development of institutions.... Read article
Changing demand for STEM skills in Australia and gender implications
A method is developed for measuring the intensity with which skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are used in different occupations based on workers’ field of education of their highest qualification and weighted by the wage premium associated... Read article
BCEC Monthly Labour Market Update – April 2021
Employment falls as JobKeeper comes to an end A nationwide run of six consecutive months of employment growth was halted in April 2021, with the number of people employed falling by 30,600 as JobKeeper came to an end. Despite the... Read article
Bachelor degree participation in vocational institutions: examining the determinants of participation
Recent studies in Australia have found that bachelor’s degree participation in vocational institutions in Australia tends to skew towards students from high and middle socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. This outcome runs counter to overall vocational participation which is dominated by... Read article
Preferences for government assistance to forced migrants: do perceptions of disadvantage matter?
Developing regions have received a significant share of refugees over the past decade yet knowledge on willingness to extend government support to these groups in host countries is limited. This paper explores how perceived disadvantage of refugees and internally displaced... Read article
Can bribery buy health? Evidence from post-communist countries
Corruption is pervasive, but we know little about its effects on individual lives. Using individual-level data from 28 post-communist countries, we demonstrate that bribing for public services worsens self-assessed health. We account for endogeneity of bribery and show that bribing... Read article
Heaven can wait: future tense and religiosity
This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the type of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are more effective for speakers of languages without inflectional future tense.... Read article