Australian Economic Review最新文献

Our paper examines  trends in gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work over the short- and long-term in Australia, including assessing the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns. We use the concept of time—historical, biographical and transitional—as a framework for our analyses. Drawing on data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we find wide and continuing gender gaps in unpaid work over the past two decades. We demonstrate that parenthood is a far greater producer and exacerbator of gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work than COVID-19 lockdowns.

Gender revolution theories of fertility posit that when employed women have extensive child care and household responsibilities, they opt to reduce family size. This study examines how household gender inequality influences decisions to have children. Several possible mediators, including wellbeing, relationship quality, and changes in desired family size, are examined. Results from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey show that household inequality reduces the likelihood of third births when both parents work full-time. This is mediated by relationship satisfaction: when men contribute more to household labour, their partners are more satisfied, which is associated with increased fertility.

When we think of economic activity, and even of work specifically, as economists we tend to overlook work that is not paid. And yet, looking after elderly family members, caring for and educating children, or preparing family dinners, are all essential services to our community and play an important role for individual wellbeing and health and social cohesion. As governments in many developing countries increasingly recognise—including the Australian Government with its recently developed Measuring What Matters Framework—national well-being goes beyond our financial situation and includes health, safety, sustainability and more. Many of those often-overlooked aspects of wellbeing are significantly supported by unpaid work.

One of the challenges for social scientists who are interested in unpaid work as an important input into our national wellbeing is the scarcity of available data. They are not included in administrative records and expensive to measure in surveys. There are two resources Australian researchers can rely on: first, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has recently published a new Time Use Survey (TUS 2020-21), a cross-sectional data set with detailed diary information form participants. And second, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey includes a range of questions asking respondents about their activities in a typical week. Both are invaluable resources for researchers of unpaid work in Australia.

This issue of the Australian Economic Review devotes its Policy Forum to unpaid work. We present three articles that all use HILDA Survey data and tackle some of the many issues surrounding unpaid work, highlighting its wide-ranging impacts on the way we live. Considering the enormous amount of time we devote to this often overlooked part of our economy, many more questions necessarily remain, and may be explored in future fora. I hope some of our readers may be inspired to make use of Australia's time-use data—both the TUS and the HILDA survey—for further discoveries.

Janeen Baxter, Alice Campbell and Rennie Lee analyse trends in the gender patterns of unpaid labour over time and find that the gender gap in unpaid care work has remained almost unchanged in the last two decades, and any narrowing of the gap in housework is due to women performing less housework without men doing more. A gender gap in unpaid work is already present in 15-year-olds but increases greatly at entry into parenthood. They also find the impact of parenthood on the gender gap in unpaid work to be far greater than that of Victoria's COVID-19 lockdowns, which were among the strictest and longest in the world. That gendered work patterns were moved so comparatively little by even such a drastic change in external circumstances demonstrates the difficulty of changing pervasive norms and behaviours.

But what are the consequences of the gender gap in unpaid work? Nataliya Ilyushina takes a close

This article analyses the research productivity of more than 200 individuals in academe with a PhD in economics and finance from (mostly) Australian universities. We find the number of publications accumulates linearly with experience, while citations increase exponentially, pointing to network effects. Panel regressions indicate: (1) the key role of experience in determining research outcomes; (2) the usual quadratic approach substantially under-estimates the role of diminishing returns to experience; (3) the university where an individual works is mostly unimportant for publications and citations. ‘Prime academic age’, when research has maximum impact, is attained about 11 years after the PhD.

Randomised trials frequently produce surprising findings, overturning conventional wisdom. During the twentieth century, randomised trials became commonplace within medicine, saving millions of lives. Randomised trials within government can now be conducted more cheaply, using administrative data. Just as it might be considered unethical to conduct a randomised trial if a program is indisputably effective, it might be considered unethical not to conduct a rigorous evaluation if a program lacks evidence. Developed within a robust ethical framework, and alongside community consultation, better evaluation can help governments save money and address social disadvantage.

This article responds to the Review of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which was released on 20 April 2023. We describe the underperformance of the Australian economy over the past decade, and identify the contribution of RBA mistakes. We suggest remedies that would improve prospects for low inflation and unemployment. Returning to general prosperity requires better coordination of monetary, fiscal and macro-prudential policy and of these with other aspects of economic policy-making. We conclude that while the RBA Review makes some valuable suggestions about structure and process at the RBA, it provides little guidance on the content of policy.

This study shows that the Xero Small Business Index (XSBI) sales growth data can be used to predict the same period's national nominal GDP growth, with high accuracy, in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Findings show that XSBI sales growth can predict the same month's GDP growth around two weeks earlier than the official release in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the three-month average of the XSBI sales growth can predict the same quarter's GDP growth, six weeks earlier than the official release in New Zealand and five weeks earlier than the official release in Australia.

This paper explores the association between pre-recorded evidence and court outcomes in cases of domestic violence. Net of controls and time fixed effects, we find that cases with pre-recorded evidence are 3.4 percentage points more likely to result in a conviction. This increase occurs through three channels: a 5.6 percentage point increase in the probability of a conviction among (the one in four) cases that proceed to a defended hearing; a 2.4 percentage point increase in the probability of a guilty plea; and, a 2.4 percentage point decrease in the probability that the prosecution withdraws their case.

There is a growing need to gauge local economic activity in real time. Localised economic challenges have been emphasised in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Real-time trackers (such as OECD trackers) and other nowcasting applications typically correspond to national or highly aggregated regions. In this discussion paper, we briefly explore how unconventional data might be used to produce nowcasts of local economies. We argue that in the absence of traditional nowcasting metrics, efforts to nowcast local economies need a local perspective, with data capture tailored to address heterogeneity across three domains: (1) resources, (2) people and (3) life.

Forecasts are relied upon as a guide to what future outcomes for the economy might be. However, it is also important to estimate what is happening in the economy now or has taken place in the recent past. This is where ‘nowcasts’ come in. In this article, I describe what nowcasting is, why it can be a useful tool for macroeconomists as well as present daily nowcasts of key Australian macroeconomic variables, including GDP growth, inflation and the unemployment rate.