Ha Vu

Disability Support Pension Recipients: Who Gets Off (and Stays Off) Payments?

We use Centrelink payment records on Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipients over the period 1995 to 2002 to investigate individual transitions off payments. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a close correspondence between disability benefit receipt and labour market outcomes: entry to DSP via unemployment benefits is associated with substantially reduced prospects of exiting DSP, while employment during the DSP spell is associated with not only an increased probability of exiting DSP, but also more success in staying off payments once an exit has been made. A further finding of our analysis is that persons who exit DSP due to take-up of employment have a relatively high rate of return to payments compared with persons who exit for other reasons, and indeed exhibit a high propensity to cycle off and on payments.

Differential Labour Market Impacts from Disability Onset

We estimate the causal labour market impacts of disability onset by gender, age and education levels up to 4 years after onset using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey and difference-in-difference propensity score matching techniques. We find lasting negative impacts on employment, especially full-time employment, which is due more to reduced movement into full-time employment than downshifting from full-time to part-time work following onset. Those without post-school education qualifications are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of onset and are more likely to be out of work and on income support than those with qualifications up to 4 years after onset, due in part because they have greater difficulty adjusting.

The dynamics of welfare participation among women who experienced teenage motherhood in Australia

This study examines whether the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who experienced teenage motherhood differ from the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who had their first child at an older age. We examine these factors across the lifetimes of both groups of women. A dynamic random effects probit model is applied to investigate the extent of state dependence in welfare participation while allowing for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity. We find evidence of state dependence for all women, but it is stronger for women who experienced teenage childbearing than for women who had a child at an older age. In addition, poor health is an important factor in increasing the probability of the welfare participation of women who experienced teenage childbearing.

Labour Market Impacts from Disability Onset

In this paper we estimate the causal labour market impacts of disability onset up to four years after onset using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) survey and difference-in-difference propensity score matching techniques. We find lasting negative impacts on employment, especially full-time employment, which is linked more to reduced movement into full-time employment than to downshifting from full-time to part-time work. Longer-term, impacts on employment and income support reliance are greater for those without post-school qualifications, which points to differential social costs of onset by education. Therefore, to be cost-effective, prevention and vocational rehabilitation measures should be targeted at low-skilled workers.

Impacts from Delaying Access to Retirement Benefits on Welfare Receipt and Expenditure: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Governments are responding to fiscal pressures associated with aging populations by increasing the eligibility age for publicly-funded retirement benefits. However, recent studies show large resulting increases in the receipt of alternative payments, which raises concern that welfare savings are offset by increased inflows into alternative payments. Using administrative data to examine the impacts of female eligibility age increases in Australia, we find little evidence of this. Instead, most of the increase in receipt is because the delay mechanically extends the receipt time of people already on alternative payments. The implication is that fiscal savings are not being jeopardized by opportunistic behaviour.

The Relationship between Labour Market Conditions and Welfare Receipt in Australia: A Stock‐Flow Analysis

Understanding the determinants of changes in welfare caseloads is an important, but little studied, topic in Australia. This paper evaluates the role of labour market conditions in explaining the changes in the Australian welfare caseload since the late 1990s. The paper employs a stock-flow approach to better control for persistence in welfare receipt and includes different specifications to deal with measurement error in labour market data. The results suggest that the labour market is an important determinant of movements on and off welfare, accounting for the majority of the caseload decline during 1997–2005. The results also highlight the importance of robustness checks when data are measured with error.