Current Projects

UNDER REVIEW

de Gendre, A. Lynch, J., Meunier, A., Pilkington, R., Schurer, S. (2023).  Child Health and Parental Responses to an Unconditional Cash Transfer at Birth. 

🏋️ Revise & Resubmit Review  of Economics & Statistics. 

Abstract. We estimate the impact on child health of the unanticipated introduction of the Australian Baby Bonus, a one-time $3,000 unconditional cash transfer given at birth. With population-level administrative data from South Australia and a regression discontinuity design, we find that eligible infants had fewer hospital presentations by age one for preventable, acute, and severe problems. Our auxiliary analyses using nationally-representative data suggest that parents increased spending on food and groceries, experienced less financial stress and hardship, and improved physical and mental health. We calculate that 34% of the payout was recouped within the first year due to lower healthcare costs.

Doyle, M.A., Guthridge, S., Schurer, S. (2025). Income and immunity: The consequences of a pre- and neo-natal income shock on childhood infection risk.

🏋️  Revise & Resubmit  Journal of Health Economics.

Abstract. We analyse the impact of a temporary reduction in income, occurring in utero and early infancy, on health in early childhood. We identify the income reduction through the gradual rollout of the so-called ‘income management’ policy in Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory in 2007. This policy changed the delivery method of welfare payments but not their value – however, implementation challenges meant that many families did not receive their payments on time. Using linked administrative data, we find that children who were exposed to the policy rollout in utero or in their first three months of life (the ‘fourth trimester’) were at higher risk of severe infection requiring hospitalisation. They spent, on average, 4.7 more days in hospital between birth and their 8th birthday. Most of this impact is concentrated in hospitalisations for infection, which increased by 23 percent. These admissions are driven by a range of infection types: bacterial, viral and respiratory. We link our findings to the ‘immune programming hypothesis’, i.e. maternal stress and poor nutrition during key stages in immune system development can permanently weaken the child’s immune system. Our findings highlight the importance of attention to key phases in child development when designing policies that affect households’ financial resources, even temporarily.

Schurer, S., Tymula, A., Wang, W., Fuller, N.,  Caterson, I. (2025). Impatience and present bias do not predict weight loss in obesity: Evidence from lab-in-field and nationally representative data.

🏋️  Revise & Resubmit Health Economics

Abstract.  Substantial literature in behavioral economics attributes obesity to behavioral problems caused by impatience and present bias. This paper demonstrates that neither impatience nor present bias significantly predicts success in attempts at reducing body fat and BMI for people with obesity. Our analysis draws on clinically measured outcomes and financially incentivized preference data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field study following 294 adults with obesity over a 12-month randomized controlled trial. We rule out that our results are driven by measurement issues, internal validity concerns, and preference-related attrition. We replicate the key finding in nationally representative survey data of 6,118 adults with obesity. Importantly, we find that baseline impatience significantly predicts the risk of drop-out from the trial before completion in an economically meaningful way. Our results suggest that ability to complete medically advised treatments is a behavioral condition, but obesity itself is not. Treatments that focus on correcting impatience or self-control alone may not be an effective strategy to facilitate weight loss in clinically relevant populations.

Guthridge, S., Schurer, S., Taylor, S. (2025). Minimum unit pricing, alcohol consumption and infant health: Evidence from the Alice Springs Liquor Supply Plan. October 2025 IZA DP No. 18201.

🔬Under review at the Journal of Public Economics.

Abstract. This paper examines the effects of minimum floor pricing of alcohol, a price-based restriction, on health outcomes in high-risk populations. We develop a theoretical model showing that minimum floor prices may fail to improve welfare if heavy drinkers—who generate most negative externalities—are price inelastic. We test this prediction using the 2006 Alice Springs Liquor Supply Plan (LSP), which effectively doubled the minimum per-unit price of alcohol by restricting container sizes for fortified and other wines (so-called cask wine). Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate that the LSP reduced per-capita alcohol consumption by 19.6%, with a demand shift away from cask and fortified wine to full-strength beer, yet demand remained inelastic ranging between –0.2 and -0.5. Consistent with the model’s predictions, we find no evidence that the policy improved birth outcomes among infants most at risk of alcohol-related harm; if anything, some indicators worsened. We discuss possible mechanisms, including substitution and income effects generated by the price increase. While data limitations restrict the reliability and precision of causal inference, the findings highlight the challenges of using price-based interventions to address externalities when harmful consumption is concentrated among price-insensitive consumers.

Nguyen, H., Schurer, S., Mitrou, F. (2025). The instability of locus of control: New insights from distributional effects of major life events. 

🔬 Under review at Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Abstract.  Previous empirical evidence suggests that locus of control (LoC), a non-cognitive skill reflecting an individual's belief that life’s outcomes result from their own efforts, is relatively unresponsive to major life events in adulthood. This study re-examines this evidence by utilizing larger and longer panel dataset to boost statistical power and allow for more flexible econometric methods to control for unobserved, time-invariant fixed and non-linear effects. Within fixed effects regression reveals that 13 out of 20 available life events are significantly impacting LoC. Although impact estimates are modest for most life events smaller than 0.1 % of a standard deviation, they are large for negative life events proxying personal finances (-0.33 SD, p < .05) and safety (-0.22 SD, p < .01). Fixed effects in unconditional quantile regression shows that the effects are large in magnitude and economically meaningful for at least four life events proxying shocks to personal finances (-0.6 SD, p < .01), safety (-0.3 SD, p < .01), health (-0.2 SD, p < .01) and relationship stability (-0.2 SD, p < .01) at the bottom third of the internal LoC distribution with penalty increases of 25%-182%. Our robust findings suggest that the evidence from the previous literature was reliable, but a small share of the population experiences economically significantly changes over a four-year window.

Glozier, N., Naehrig, D. N., Schurer, S. (2025). Evaluating job satisfaction trade-offs general practitioners make by ensuring service accessibility: Longitudinal evidence from Australia’s mixed payment system. 

🔬 Under review at Social Science & Medicine.

Abstract. The design of primary care payment systems is central to sustaining the medical workforce and ensuring equitable access to care. Mixed payment models are widely used in universal healthcare systems, yet concerns about general practitioner (GP) income, workload, and job satisfaction persist across OECD countries. In Australia’s mixed payment system, many GPs improve access by accepting the lower government rebate as full payment (“bulk billing”), eliminating patient co-payments but reducing their own earnings. This study examines the job satisfaction consequences of this trade-off. Using ten years of longitudinal data from the Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life (MABEL) survey and panel data methods, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the share of bulk-billed patients is associated with a 0.054 standard deviation reduction in job satisfaction (SE = 0.009, p < 0.001). Shifting from charging co-payments for all patients to almost none corresponds to a decline in job satisfaction equivalent to approximately two-thirds of the GP gender gap. No significant socio-demographic heterogeneity is observed, although negative effects are concentrated among high-intensity bulk-billing GPs. Increased working hours and poorer health appear to be important mediating factors. Difference-in-differences estimates further show that the 2014 freeze of the government rebate—threatening the financial viability of low co-payment practices—led to an additional reduction in job satisfaction of 0.050 standard deviations (SE = 0.024, p = 0.047). These findings suggest that policies aimed at increasing bulk billing may be undermined by existing incentives and the associated job satisfaction trade-offs.

Available as Life Course Centre Working Paper Series, 2025-09. Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland. DOI: 10.14264/4ebb23a.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Child wellbeing and development in the Northern Territory

Guthridge, S., Schnepel, K., Schurer, S. (2025). Neonatal care improves human capital development by age five for moderate-risk infants: Causal evidence from Australia's Northern Territory. 

⏰ Draft completed - Awaiting  final approval from data custodians.

Abstract. We document large human capital gains from a common early-life intervention in the form of admission to a Special Care Nursery (SCN) at birth. Clinical decision rules at birthweight thresholds allow us to identify a causal impact of SCN admission which typically involves an extra week in hospital care for moderate-risk infants. Linking population-based perinatal records from Australia’s Northern Territory with data of the Australian Early Development Census, we find that infants admitted to a SCN are significantly more likely to be developmentally on track and have significantly higher levels of physical health and socio-emotional wellbeing at school entry. 

Cameron, L., Darcy Coulter, Guyonne Kalb, Stefanie Schurer, Pat Dudgeon, Tanya Hirvonen, Ee Pin Chang, Rhema Vaithianathan, and Steven Guthridge, (2025). Learning about adversity in the lives of First Nations youth through the lens of high-quality linked administrative data. 

⏰Draft completed - Awaiting approval from data custodians. Please do not cite without permission from authors.

Abstract. This paper demonstrates that routinely collected and linked administrative data on education, health care use, and contact with the child protection and juvenile justice systems can be used to develop an informative indicator for risk of multi-dimensional adversity. We use data from a novel linked administrative data repository – the Child and Youth Development Research Program (CYDRP) – selecting all First Nations youth who were born between 2000 and 2006 and are observed living in Australia’s Northern Territory (N=9,869). We test a simple index of adversity that counts up to seven exposures to events with assumed negative consequences (low school attendance and achievement, diagnoses of mental health and substance use disorders, child protection notifications and maltreatment substantiations, and criminal charges) between ages 12 and 18. We demonstrate that this index is strongly predictive of suicide and suicide attempts, an important public policy challenge. We identify substantial variation in adversity experienced by individuals across communities, varying from an average of two to four adversities in remote communities, and slightly lower overall levels in more urban communities. Importantly, more than one in two children have low levels of adversity. Family-fixed factors explain 7.5 times more of the variation in adversity than community-fixed factors. This suggests that family-specific policy initiatives are likely to be more effective than broader programs targeting communities.

Farmer, A., Jayasinghe, M., Mitrou, F., Schurer, S., Shaw, R., Toka, C., Wardle, I. (2025). Breaking the Great Australian Silence: Forced Removal Eroded Trust and Wellbeing of the Stolen Generations.   

✍️ Draft in process.

Abstract. Trust lies at the heart of all human interactions. We examined the long-term mistrust and distress consequences of forced separation on the survivors of the Stolen Generations among Australia's First Nations people. Using data from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) and multivariate regression modelling, we find that the Stolen Generations and their children, relative to First Nations peoples without immediate family forced separation experience, exhibit significantly higher levels of mistrust, especially toward hospital staff and police, regardless of gender or geography. Separation experiences that occurred post the protection and assimilation era (> 1973), is also significantly associated with mistrust. The mistrust effects are almost twice as large as those identified for the long-term trust consequences of exposure to slavery on the African continent. Despite assimilation goals and effective loss of the ability to speak an Indigenous language, the Stolen Generations and their descendants maintain significantly stronger cultural connections, highlighting the importance of their cultural identity of choice. The federal and state governments must address the harms of past policies and current practices in child protection, which remove Aboriginal children at a 10 times greater rate than non-Aboriginal children, perpetuating mistrust and distress imposed on families. Our findings emphasise the urgency for governments to rebuild trust and repair community resilience.

Child protection in NSW

Schurer, S., Wright, A. C., Cashmore, J., Mallos, A., Luu, B., Wardle, I. (2025). Youth who go missing from care: Characteristics and risk profiles. 

🐾 Currently in print process as Australian Public Policy Insights Paper. Please do not cite without permission from authors.

Abstract. Youth who go missing from out-of-home care represent a small but highly vulnerable group within child protection systems, yet empirical evidence on their trajectories remains limited. This paper examines the characteristics, placement experiences, and service system contact of children and young people in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, who exited out-of-home care recorded as ‘missing’. Using a novel linked administrative dataset drawn from the NSW Human Services Dataset and linked across multiple government systems, we analyse 1,684 care episodes involving 1,149 unique children between 2000 and 2019. Although exits recorded as missing account for only 0.5% of all care episodes, the findings reveal marked concentration of risk. Children who went missing were more likely to enter care at older ages, experience substantially greater placement instability, and be placed in residential, alternative, or independent living arrangements rather than foster or kinship care. Youth refuges were associated with the highest relative risk of missing exits. Most missing events occurred during adolescence, with the average exit age nearly seven years older than for children who never went missing. Linkage to justice, health, housing, police, and education records demonstrates that young people who go missing from care are already highly visible across service systems prior to their exit, and that risk intensifies following a missing episode. Compared with peers who never exit care as missing, these children experience significantly higher contact with juvenile and adult justice systems, police, homelessness services, and victimisation. While most re-enter care—often within three months—nearly one quarter do not, yet almost all appear in other government systems shortly after going missing. Cluster analysis identifies a dominant post-missing profile characterised by complex, overlapping needs spanning safety, justice involvement, housing insecurity, and health. Together, the findings highlight missing from care as a critical system failure point and underscore the need for earlier intervention, greater placement stability, and cross-system responses to prevent harm and disengagement among at-risk youth.

Schurer, S., Wright, A., Cashmore, J., MacMillan, E., Luu, B., Wardle, I. (2025). The cooling down effect of fmily-led decision making: Behavioural responses to small but scalable interventions in the child protection system. 

✍️ Draft in process.

Abstract.  We study the cost effectiveness of the Family Group Conference (FGC), a small but potentially scalable intervention to boost family-led decision making that has been rolled out in stages in New South Wales’ child protection system since 2017. Using linked unit-record data on program receipt and child protection outcomes, we isolate the causal impact of the program by comparing outcomes before and after referral to the FGC, using families who will receive the FGC in the future as controls. Detailed analyses of the pre-referral trend in system contact show that families were referred into the program at the height of family conflict, as measured by the risk of contact with the system. We control for this differential pre-referral trend with state-of-the-art difference-in-differences methods and careful construction of cohort controls. We find that the FGC significantly reduced the risk of contact with the system and of harm substantiation in the first 12 months of the program, the period of follow-up for which we have reliable data. Qualitative evidence from family and facilitator interviews is used to explain the positive effects of the program. Although program facilitation and administration cost per family reach almost A$8,000 (> EUR4,500), the FGC has strong potential to be cost effective by taking the heat out of vulnerable families when they most need support.

Schurer, S., Wright, A.C., Ciftci, S., Luu, B., Pope, S., Pritchard, B., O’Flaherty, L., Witbreuk, N. & Kendall, Z. (2025). Understanding the child safety consequences of an early investment program: Evidence from the New South Wales Family Connect Service.

✍️ Draft in process.

Miscellaneous

de Gendre, A., Schurer, S., Zhang, A. (2021). Two decades of welfare reforms in Australia How did they affect single mothers and their children? 

Available as IZA Discussion Paper Nr. 14752 (27 September 2021).