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"An important group of interest for industrial tribunals in Australia is those workers who are reliant on awards for their pay and other employment conditions. Research on award reliance and its consequences, however, has long been hampered by the lack of good quality microdata. Most obviously, there are relatively few data sets in Australia that identify the method by which pay is set and also provide detailed information about individuals and the households in which they live. The HILDA Survey, however, is an exception to this, with information about award reliance, and methods of pay setting more generally, being collected for the first time in its 8th survey wave (in 2008). This paper reviews the quality of the data on award reliance that is being collected from this source. It then provides two examples of how these data can inform policy-relevant research questions: (i) to what extent are award-reliant workers found living in income-poor households; and (ii) what role does award reliance play in contributing to the gender pay gap? The results confirm that award-reliant workers are not especially concentrated in poor households, and that for award-reliant workers there is no evidence of any gender-based pay gap

"By OECD standards, the share of the Australian labour force with at least a secondary school qualification is low. One way to rectify this shortfall is to improve rates of re-engagement in education among early school leavers. This paper examines the patterns of re-engagement among early school leavers in the HILDA sample. A key finding is that the early years after leaving school are crucially important, with rates of re-engagement dropping dramatically in the first three years out from school. For those who enter the labour market after school, results suggest that finding work, especially satisfying work, is an important driver for returning to study

"This paper addresses the applicability of the theory of equalizing differences (Rosen, 1986) in a market in which temporary and permanent workers co-exist. The assumption of perfect competition in the labour market is directly questioned and a model is developed in which the labour market is described as a duopsony and the relation between wage and non-monetary job characteristics is studied for workers with different contract lengths. The empirical analysis, based on several waves of the UK Labour Force Data, confirms several of the hypotheses suggested by the model and emphasizes how in the short run workers who have experienced a change in their employer can expect a career trajectory in line with the theory on compensating differentials. In particular, while the wage dynamic related to workers shifting from a temporary contract to another temporary position cannot be exactly predicted, shifts from temporary to permanent contracts tend to be linked to a reduction in wages and a simultaneous increase in travel-to-work distance. Nonetheless, when unobserved characteristics are accounted for in the selection process into temporary contracts, these results lose significance and only a positive relation between wage and commuting time persists, irrespective of the type of contract."--Abstract

"This paper estimates the impact of fertility on mothers' labour supply in Australia, using exogenous variation in family size generated by twin births and the gender mix of siblings. Results show that having more than one child decreases labour market participation by 15.5 percentage points and hours worked by around 6 hours per week. Having more than two children reduces labour market participation by between 12 and 20 percentage points and hours worked by between 3 and 8 hours a week, depending on the instrument used. Interestingly, fathers also reduce both their labour market participation (by 10 percentage points) and their number of hours worked per week (by 4 hours) when having more than one child. Compared with the results obtained with the same methodology for other countries, the effects for Australia are large, which partly reflects the constraints on public childcare and the lack of a national paid parental leave scheme prior to 2011."--p. 2

"In this paper we consider why firms sometimes choose an external development path for their own inventions, despite the costs of contracting and the risks of opportunitistic behaviour and expropriation." -- Abstract