How do households respond to health shocks? Secular increases in the incidence of dual earning couples, and the aging of the workforce make this question particularly relevant for economists and policymakers. We use Australian data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey to study this question. Using an event study design, we find that the labor supply of those that experience a health shock decreases from their baseline for more than a year. Home production increases for the spouse of the ill person in two dimensions: increased time spent caring for household members and increased time spent on household chores. We also find that households spend more money on household items and less on holidays and alcohol in response to the health shock. We discuss our findings in relation to the provision of social insurance in advanced economies.

As climate change generates more damaging weather-related events more often, the question of who bears intensifying disaster risk becomes increasingly pertinent. Drawing on disaster sociology, the environmental justice literature and quantitative studies of disaster impacts in real-estate markets, this paper contributes to research efforts to explore distributional questions of climate risk. We examine an actual flood event in an area of Australia that is increasingly recognised as vulnerable to rising flood risk. Our analysis combines geospatial analysis of flooding in residential areas, household-level socioeconomic data and data on house prices to identify socioeconomic patterns in the impacts of a flooding disaster that indicate broader patterns in flood risk exposure and resilience with implications for longer term dynamics of climate-related inequality. Our results show not only that risk exposure was greatest amongst the most disadvantaged communities but also that the most disadvantaged incurred substantially greater losses in comparison to equally flooded locations in wealthier areas, indicating exacerbated balance sheet losses on the part of disadvantaged households who are pushed into acute financial distress as a result of the floods. Variation in both risk exposure and impacts reflect that the costs borne as a result of climate-related disasters play out distinctly amongst different socioeconomic groups. Our analysis of key data sources undertaken at a high level of granularity contributes to much needed empirical research on the socioeconomic distribution of unfolding climate-related risks outside of heavily studied US locations.

This study examines changes in birth rates in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic and the extent to which such changes were influenced by lockdowns. We use natality data at State and small regional area levels spanning the period from 2011 to 2022. In our empirical approach, we first take advantage of a unique quasi-experimental setting that arose in Victoria, Australia’s second most populous State, during the first year of the pandemic. Victoria imposed a 111-day stay-at-home lockdown while other States and Territories enforced milder restrictions on social and economic activities. We then exploit lockdowns that lasted more than three months in Victoria and New South Wales in the second year of the pandemic. Within these quasi-experimental settings, our empirical approach was to first use monthly data at the State-level and estimate birth rate deviations from secular trends for the months affected by COVID-19 policies. We also estimate separate models to examine variations in births across regional areas with different compositions of Indigenous population, unemployment, low-income, and non-English speaking residents. Our findings reveal a nationwide fertility increase in 2021, but Victoria exhibited slower growth, especially in areas with higher unemployment, lower income, and more non-English speaking residents. In 2022, we find evidence of a gradual return of birth rates to pre-pandemic trends, though this is mainly concentrated in the major cities. While the second-year lockdowns had limited impacts, language-diverse areas still mostly experienced lower rates of growth in birth rates. 

Each year the UK records 25,000 or more excess winter deaths, primarily among the elderly. A key policy response is the “Winter Fuel Payment” (WFP), a labelled but unconditional cash transfer to older households. The WFP has been shown to raise fuel spending among eligible households. We examine the causal effect of the WFP on health outcomes, including self-reports of chest infection, measured hypertension and bio-markers of infection and inflammation. We find a robust and statistically significant five percentage point reduction in the incidence of high levels of serum fibrinogen, but no significant effect for other markers of illness. 

A substantial body of research on the UK National Minimum Wage has concluded that the introduction and subsequent up-ratings of the NMW have not had a detrimental effect on employment. This research has directly influenced, through the Low Pay Commission, the conduct of policy. We revisit this literature and o er a reassessment, motivated by two concerns. First, this literature employs difference-in-difference designs, even though there are significant challenges in conducting appropriate inference in such designs, and they can have very low power when inference is conducted appropriately. Second, the literature has focused on the binary outcome of statistical rejection of the null hypothesis, without attention to the range of employment effects that are consistent with the data. In our reanalysis of the data, we conduct inference using recent suggestions for best practice and consider what magnitude of employment effects the data can and cannot rule out. We find that the data are consistent with both large negative and positive impacts of the UK National Minimum Wage on employment. We conclude that the existing data, combined with difference-in-difference designs, in fact offers very little guidance to policy makers.

Using Australian Longitudinal Tax data, we study earnings risk and income insurance for Australian workers over the business cycle. We characterize the distribution of earnings growth and show deviations of the distribution from normality and linearity. We find that the distribution of earnings growth display negative skewness, and that the left-skewness becomes more severe for individuals with high earnings and as individuals get older. We document that skewness is procyclical as negative earnings shocks become more likely in recessions than in expansion periods. However, there is large variation in skewness across local labour markets. In recessions skewness is large and negative in local labour markets that rely on hardly hit industries, while skewness is only mildly negative or even positive in labour markets where most of individuals are employed in less affected industries. We then explore the role of welfare, investment and spouse earnings as insurance mechanisms from earnings risk and find that welfare is the most relevant channel to insure income. Finally, we estimate the impulse response function and show that negative earnings changes are more persistent for workers at the top of the earnings distribution than those at the bottom.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home. In 2020-21 the proportion of Australians working some time from home increased from 25% to 36% and only marginally declined in 2022-23 when most of the restrictions were lifted. Using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we study how the relationship between working from home and time spent in home production activities changed during the Covid-19 pandemic and the years afterwards. Applying fixed-effect models and exploiting variation in the share of hours worked at home we show that the gap in home production between women that worked from home and those that worked on-site increased during the COVID -19 pandemic and then returned to pre-pandemic levels in the two subsequent years. For men the increase in home production due to working from home experienced during the COVID -19 pandemic persisted in 2022-23. Examining differences in the woman’s share of family home production, we find evidence of a reduction in the gender inequality in the allocation of home production if the man works from home a substantial proportion of hours. After controlling for time on paid work and job-related stress, we also find that women feel less pressured if they work from home most of the hours.