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The SPEAR Centre commenced in 2000 as a joint initiative between the Australian Government Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS), now the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA) and the Economics Group in the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. The Centre’s initial social policy research agreement with FaCS concluded at the end of 2004, but was renewed with increased funding for a second five-year Social Policy Research Services Agreement, covering the period 2005-2009. The Centre's focus remains on ensuring that social policy evaluation in Australia derives maximum benefit from the latest international developments.
During the term of the first SPEAR Centre contract, staff and affiliates were very active in introducing modern program evaluation techniques into the broader Australian research community. Their commitment to the development and expansion of Australia’s capacity to undertake program evaluation resulted in an active training program that promoted a firm understanding of current methods of program evaluation among interested policy makers and academics. SPEAR Centre courses included:
Centre members maintain strong links with government departments, as well as with other organisations and academics engaged in social policy evaluation.
Future plans for The SPEAR Centre include:
The SPEAR Centre Research Agenda for 2007 includes projects on the following topics:
This research examines child care usage patterns of child support payers and payees in order to:
The research will analyse the following questions:
This research will analyse the following questions:
This project aims to investigate causal links between the mode and the intensity of care and children’s development in Australia. To this end we are building and estimating a structural model using LSAC data over the next two years.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the early childhood experience is vital to children’s development and their success later in life. A significant feature of early childhood is child care. Researchers are currently trying to understand the effect of child care on children’s development. While the debate continues, a consensus seems to emerge that non-parental child care can be beneficial for children’s development, provided the care is of “high quality”. In this research we propose to investigate causal links between the mode and the intensity of care (child care hours) on the one hand and children’s development on the other. The bulk of empirical evidence today is gathered in other countries. Since the quality of child care in Australia is relatively high in comparison with other countries, it is not clear that international results are applicable in Australia. It is therefore important to consider the Australian case directly.So, the aim of this project is to investigate causal links between the mode and the intensity of care and children’s development in Australia.
This projects attempts to answer the following research questions: How do fertility patterns change over time, and what factors are associated with these changes? Why do people’s fertility intentions change over time or what prevents them from meeting their fertility goals?
Using HILDA data, we will explore the role of the following factors in influencing fertility plans and the extent to which they will be achieved:
This project examines the affect of caring on labour market participation.
Many Australians provide care to older relatives and people with a disability. In 2003, 2.5 million people (16% of the population aged 15 years and over) provided such care to 2.1 million people (ABS Social Trends 2005).
Since a significant portion of informal care is provided by people of working age, an important policy question is to understand how caring affects labour market participation. According to ABS data, 21% of primary carers were employed part-time and 17% full-time. Some respondents say that their caring duties were the main reason they left the labour market.
In this project, we are using panel data to look at the association between changes in caring for the elderly or disabled, and changes in labour force participation. We also propose to look at whether an increase in caring obligations is associated with a change in self-reported life satisfaction.
This project investigates young people’s characteristics and outcomes in relation to the income support history for the family. The research takes advantage of new survey data collected as part of the Youth in Focus project to assess the relationship between a young person’s characteristics and outcomes on the one hand and the income support history of his or her family on the other. In particular, we are interested in the following questions:
This research will provide a broad picture of the ways in which income support histories might matter for young people and will be important identifying the most important areas for future research. Moreover, this exercise will be fundamental to developing a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Youth in Focus Survey data themselves.
This will be a descriptive analysis of the survey data arising from the Youth in Focus project. As such, it will provide a foundation for identifying the key research areas to be pursued in the future. It will result in a broad overview of the ways in which income support histories affect the outcomes of young people.
This project looks at the question of how much of the apparent year-to-year mobility in income in Australia is based on real changes in the incomes of individuals and how much on ‘noise’ in the measurement of income.
There are good reasons for expecting individuals to move around the income distribution from year-to-year. These include: changes in employment status; changes in the jobs of those employed, including promotion; improved job performance and consequent higher wages associated with increased experience; changes in living arrangements associated with lifecycle factors, such as partnering and family formation; transitions from study to the full-time workforce; variation in the return on financial assets from year to year; and health shocks, among other factors. The impacts of these factors vary in the extent to which they are ‘permanent’ or ‘temporary’, but constitute ‘real’ sources mobility in income from year-to-year. Measurement error might arise where individuals guess their income, or round their income to nearby aggregates (say the nearest ‘000) or deliberately and/or systematically over- or understate their reports from year to year. While this error does not contribute to true income mobility, it may act to inflate artificially measured income mobility.
The research aims to estimate what part of the variance in the change in income from year-to-year that arises from measurement error. This estimate can then be used to estimate the contribution to apparent income of measurement error via simulation methods. Data from the first five waves of HILDA will be used to do this.
This project investigates the impact of the Child Care Benefits (CCB) on fertility of Australians , using micro-data at the individual and the household levels. This study builds on our 2006 research project designed to explore how fertility responds to income incentives provided by child-related schemes in Australia, where we found that Australians do adjust their birth decisions in reaction to public programs that offer financial incentives associated with children. Thus, the CCB, as another principal family support scheme in Australia, may also stimulate fertility by reducing the cost , though indirectly, of raising children , especially for women who would also like to participate in labour market.
This project investigates characteristics of groups of children showing different developmental outcomes.
It looks at the question of which groups of children face developmental and social problems. Whilst it is recognized that Australia’s health, education and social systems are effective for the majority of children, there is rising concern over the most vulnerable and at risk groups for whom these systems may not work so well. For example, childhood disabilities, child abuse and neglect, psychological and psychosocial conditions remain problems for today’s Australian children, which appear to be associated with social adversity. Evidence on the prevalence and distribution of these problems among Australian children is crucial in informing policy development about targeting and funding. By analysing the distribution of these problems using a rich and representative dataset, this study aims to contribute to the policy discussion.
This project examines the changes over time of numbers of children living in families reliant on government income assistance.
Longitudinal Data Set (LDS) data indicate that the trend increase in the number of lone mothers on low incomes has continued since the mid 1990, increasing by 132,000 or 48 per cent between 1995 and 2005. In the eighteen months following June 2005, and for the first time in two and half decades, there has been a remarkable change. The number has fallen 38,000. What explains this strong trend growth and the sudden change? This project is directed towards answering this question.
The project will:
Accessible and affordable childcare is an important factor in achieving the goal of balancing work and child-rearing. This project will estimate how the number of childcare places (capacity), staff-child ratio (quality), and hourly fee (cost) are associated with changes in the likelihood that families perceive difficulties in finding a place at the childcare centre of their choice, finding good quality childcare, dealing with the cost of childcare, and finding care during school holidays. More detailed measures of capacity, quality, and cost of childcare may be integrated into the analysis. Investigating the impact of these perceived difficulties could shed light on the causes behind the actual behavioural decisions on labour force participation and childcare utilization.
Immigration Workshop - 30th November to 1st December, 2006:
Held at Innovations Building ANU Campus.
Program
This meeting is linked to the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant included below in Section 4. The second day of the meeting included the launch of the book “Public Policy and Immigrant Settlement”, edited by Deborah Cobb-Clark and Siew-Ean Khoo, and published by Edward Elgar The book is the result of research undertaken under this grant.
The Social Policy Evaluation Annual Conference – February 2005
The Social Policy Evaluation Annual Conference (SPEAC) was held in Canberra from 23 rd to 25 th February 2005. This meeting was the result of a collaboration between The SPEAR Centre, The IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn) and the Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services. The aim of this meeting was to establish an active network in the area of labour market programs by bringing together leading international researchers in a relaxed atmosphere.
The goal of the workshop was to discuss international experiences with social policies and reforms, and to exchange ideas about methodological advances in program evaluation. The focus was on papers undertaking evaluation of non-standard social policies and/or using non-standard methods. Speakers were from Australia, the United States of America, Switzerland, Germany, France and Israel. The topics covered included: evaluation of income-support and educational policies, the evaluation of social reforms, and the evaluation of health policies. The second SPEAC Conference was held in Uppsala, Sweden, in October 2006.
In 2001 the Australian Research Council awarded a grant for research into Public Policy Immigrant Settlement to Dr D. Cobb-Clark of The SPEAR Centre, and Dr S.E. Khoo of The Australian Centre for Population Research.
The results of this research appeared in 2006 in a 264 page book “Public Policy and Immigrant Settlement”, edited by Deborah Cobb-Clark and Siew-Ean Khoo, and published by Edward Elgar. This book examines the role of immigration policy, and of economic and social policies in promoting the settlement of immigrants to Australia. It is based on research on two groups of recent immigrants who arrived six years apart during the 1990s holding a range of visas including family reunion, skilled and humanitarian visas. Contributors include B.R. Chiswick, D.A. Cobb-Clark, T. Gørgens, S. Kennedy, S.-E. Khoo, A.T. Le, J.T. McDonald, P.W. Miller, P.J. Thapa.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Dependence on Income Support: Patterns, Causation and Implications for Australian Social Policy Research is a 5-year ARC Linkage Grants-funded project in which the ANU is working with the Australian Government Department of Family and Community Services. The researchers on this project are Dr Deborah Cobb-Clark, Dr Robert Breunig, Dr Tue Gørgens of the Australian National University, Professor Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne, and Professors Robert Haveman and Barbara Wolfe of The University of Wisconsin. The aim of this project is to examine the consequences of growing up in an income-support family. The first stage will describe the relationship between parents’ and children’s income-support receipt to determine whether these children are more likely to access income-support programs themselves. Stage 2 will identify the causal mechanisms through which parental income-support receipt influences children’s outcomes. Identification of these transmission mechanisms is a necessary first step in formulating policies targeted towards breaking any cycle of welfare dependence. This project is innovative in its use of survey data merged to unique administrative data that link the income-support records of some 53,000 young Australians and their parents . A pilot for the study, which will involve surveying approximately 2,000 Australian youths and parents, is scheduled for mid-2005.
Chris Ryan. MEc (ANU), BCom, PhD ( Melbourne)
J.Z. (Elliott) Fan, BA ( National Taiwan University), MA, PhD ( University of Toronto)
Tue Gørgens, Cand. Oecon (Aarhus) PhD ( Iowa)
Andrew Leigh, BA, LLB (Sydney), MPA, PhD (Harvard)
Anastasia Sartbayeva, MEc (ANU), PhD (ANU)
Elena Varganova, BS ( Iowa State) MS ( Siberian Aerospace Academy)
Chikako Yamauchi, BA, MA ( University of Tsukuba) CPhil, PhD (UCLA)
Juan Baron, B.Ec. ( Columbia), M.Ec. (ANU)
Topic : Essays in Applied Microeconomics
Michelle Tan, B.Bus (RMIT), GradDipIntDevEc, MintDevEc (ANU)
Topic: The Economic Consequences of Marital Breakdown
Susan Lindsay, BA (ANU) (part-time)
Bob Gregory, BComm (Melb), PhD(Lond), FASSA, AO
Deborah Cobb-Clark, BA MA (Mich.State) PhD ( Mich)
Xiaodong Gong, BSc(Fudan), MA(Renmin Uni of China), PhD( Tilburg)
Matthew Taylor,
Stephen Whelan, BCom/LLB (NSW), MAgEc (Sydney), PhD (UBC)
