Four Dimensions of Quality in Australian Jobs

We develop and analyse comprehensive, multi-item scales of the quality of Australian jobs, using the rich measures of job characteristics from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. Through exploratory methods and multidimensional item response theory modelling, we uncover four gender-specific scales that describe the autonomy, demands/engagement, compensation adequacy and security of jobs. From 2001 to 2016, women’s job demands/engagement and compensation adequacy grew noticeably, and men’s job demands/engagement grew somewhat. Since the mid-2000s, job security has fallen for both women and men. Job quality rises with job tenure, work experience and health, and falls following involuntary job changes.     

Introducing ‘Journeys Home’

Homelessness, despite being a major social policy issue in Australia, is an area that is not well served by data. Most sorely lacking is any large‐scale panel study that follows a broad sample of persons with recent experience of homelessness and unstable housing histories. In 2010, the Australian Government set about rectifying this deficiency when it commissioned the Melbourne Institute to undertake a new panel study, now known as ‘Journeys Home’. This study draws its sample from the population of Centrelink income‐support recipients, targeting persons identified in the administrative data as having recent experience of homelessness, as well as others with similar characteristics who may be vulnerable to housing difficulties in the future. This article summarises the design of this new study and reports on fieldwork outcomes from the first two waves of data collection.     

Access to Flexible Working and Informal Care

We use matched employer–employee data to explore the relationship between employees’ access to flexible working arrangements and the amount of informal care they provide to sick or elderly friends and relatives. Flexitime and the ability to reduce working hours are each associated with about 13% more hours of informal care. Workplaces do not respond to the presence of carers by providing flexible work, instead there is some underlying selection of carers into flexible workplaces. The wider workplace environment beyond formal flexible work may also facilitate care.     

Investigating regional house price convergence in the United States: Evidence from a pair-wise approach

In this paper we examine long-run house price convergence across US states using a novel econometric approach advocated by Pesaran (2007) and Pesaran et al. (2009). Our empirical modelling strategy employs a probabilistic test statistic for convergence based on the percentage of unit root rejections among all state house price differentials. Using a sieve bootstrap procedure, we construct confidence intervals and find evidence in favour of convergence. We also conclude that speed of adjustment towards long-run equilibrium is inversely related to distance.     

Does housework lower wages? Evidence for Britain

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to present the first estimates of the housework-wage relationship in Britain. Controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity, we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women, both married and single, who work full-time. Among women working part-time, only single women suffer a housework penalty. The housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full-time jobs but some part-time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others. We find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present.     

Endogenous trade bloc formation in an asymmetric world

This paper investigates how variations in endowments and the structure of preferences impact on the coalition formation decisions of asymmetric countries. There exist relatively few general results on the relationship between country characteristics and trade bloc formation. Here, new light is shed on this issue by systematically simulating bloc formation and by explicitly analysing the blocking behaviour of coalitions. A general equilibrium model of world trade is implemented with equilibrium coalition formation being modelled using the equilibrium concept of the core. It is found that global free trade is observed when all countries are similar. Customs unions tend to form between countries with ‘adjacent’ consumer preferences or with ‘adjacent’ endowments of their export commodity. Finally, in contrast to the existing literature but consistent with observed behaviour, it is found that free trade areas often Pareto dominate customs unions, provided consumer preferences differ sufficiently.     

The swing voter's curse with adversarial preferences

We analyze voting behavior in a large electorate in which voters have adversarial state-contingent preferences with incomplete information about the state of the world. We show that one type of voter can suffer from the swing voter's curse à la Feddersen and Pesendorfer [The swing voter's curse, Amer. Econ. Rev. 86 (1996) 408-424], and go on to characterize the symmetric Nash equilibria of this model under different parameter values. We prove that unlike settings with nonadversarial preferences, there are equilibria in which in one state of the world, a minority-preferred candidate almost surely wins the election and thus the election may fail to correctly aggregate information. Indeed, we show that the fraction of the electorate dissatisfied with the result can be as large as .     

Information Disclosure as Environmental Regulation: A Theoretical Analysis

Governments around the world are beginning to embrace a new form of environmental regulation – mandatory disclosure of information. While information disclosure programs appear to have an impact on subsequent firm behavior – often resulting in lower levels of pollution – little is known about the costs and benefits of these programs and whether or not they enhance social welfare. This paper presents a simple bargaining model where mandatory information disclosure is used to overcome a lack of information on the part of the public. We characterize the conditions under which information disclosure will lead to a reduction in emissions, and ultimately, the conditions under which it will enhance social welfare. Several extensions of the model are briefly explored, including the effect of two sources of pollution – only one of which is subject to information disclosure. This paper was prepared while V. Santhakumar was a Visiting Scholar at the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University.