Markus H. Hahn

Panelwhiz and the Australian Longitudinal Data Infrastructure in Economics

PanelWhiz is a graphical user interface that was written for the statistical software, Stata SE/MP Version 11 (Win/Mac/Linux) or later, which allows users to extract data from complicated multi‐level longitudinal datasets in an easy and efficient manner. Specifically, Australian datasets, such as Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life, Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, Footprints in Time - The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children and Consumer Attitudes, Sentiments & Expectations in Australia, have already been integrated into the common platform of the PanelWhiz system.

Perceived Job Discrimination in Australia: Its Correlates and Consequences

We use data from a nationally representative Australian household panel survey to examine the extent and nature of self-reported job discrimination, its correlates, and its associations with various employment outcomes and measures of subjective wellbeing. We find that approximately 8.5% of job applicants and 7.5% of employees report being discriminated against in the preceding two years, most commonly on the basis of their age. Gender is found to be a common factor predicting perceived discrimination in both job applications and in the course of employment, but the determinants of these two types of discrimination are otherwise somewhat different. In particular, age is a significant determinant of perceived discrimination in job applications only, while being a mother of young children is a significant factor only for discrimination in the course of employment. We also find that, holding other traits constant, ethnic and religious minorities are not significantly more likely to perceive they have been discriminated against. Little evidence of adverse effects of perceived job discrimination is found for wage levels, wage changes and the probability of promotion, but we find large negative effects on subjective outcomes such as job satisfaction and self-assessed probability of job loss.

Job Insecurity and Future Labour Market Outcomes

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to test the degree to which measures of job insecurity are correlated with changes in labour market status. Three major findings are reported. First, the perceived probability of job loss is only weakly related to both exogenous job separations and subsequent transitions to unemployment and inactivity. Second, while fears of job loss tend to persist across time and job spells, they do so at a highly diminishing rate, suggesting that the impacts on other outcomes (such as psychological well-being) may be quite limited. Third, quit intentions are strongly correlated with both voluntary separations and transitions to alternative employment. The desire to quit, however, does not appear to diminish greatly across successive employment spells.

Transitioning from an Historical to a Contemporary Use of Tax Record Data for Measuring Top Incomes in Australia

A major literature using tax data measures the share of income captured by the top of the income distribution. We correct existing Australian estimates by removing employers’ social contributions from the denominator and explain the limitations of using public record tax tables to capture the numerator. We show that Australian Tax Office unit record sample data are only able to accurately measure incomes of top income groups below the top 1 per cent. We conclude that greater access to the entire unit tax record population will be necessary to bring Australian research in this area up to that in the United States and United Kingdom.

Does Income Inequality in Early Childhood Predict Self-Reported Health in Adulthood? A Cross-National Comparison of the United States and Great Britain ☆

Abstract We use Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) data from the United States and Great Britain to investigate the association between adults’ health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top income percentiles from the early 20th century. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to CNEF data from both countries that measure self-reported health of individuals between 1991 and 2007. Observationally, adult men and women in the United States and Great Britain less often report being in better health if inequality was higher in their first five years of life. Although the trend in inequality is similar in both countries over the past century, the empirical association between health and inequality in the United States differs substantially from the estimated relationship in Great Britain. When we control for demographic characteristics, measures of permanent income, and early-life socio-economic status, the health–inequality association remains robust only in the U.S. sample. For the British sample, the added controls drive the coefficient on inequality toward zero and statistical insignificance.

The perceived probability of job loss and future labour market outcomes

Longitudinal survey data are used to test the degree to which worker expectations of future job loss are correlated with changes in labour market status. Three major findings are reported. First, perceived probabilities of expected job loss are only weakly related to both exogenous job separations and subsequent transitions to unemployment and inactivity. Second, while fears of job loss tend to persist across time and job spells, they do so at a highly diminishing rate. Third, quit intentions are strongly correlated with both voluntary separations and transitions to alternative employment, and do not diminish greatly across successive employment spells.