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SPEAR Background
The SPEAR Centre is a joint initiative between the Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS) and the Economics Group in the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. Given the increasingly high expectations of social policy in terms of both program delivery and cost effectiveness, efficient and accurate social policy evaluation is critical and must move beyond conventional descriptive analysis. The Centre's objective is to ensure that social policy evaluation in Australia derives maximum benefit from the latest international developments in social policy evaluation.
An outstanding feature of the SPEAR Centre is its focus on and expertise in econometric and statistical methods of program evaluation. Centre staff and affiliates are introducing modern program evaluation techniques into the broader Australian research community. SPEAR Centre researchers have a detailed knowledge of a range of large-scale, nationally representative data sources as a result of having established a close working relationship with the Department of Family and Community Services and the considerable amount of research utilising these data that Centre staff are currently undertaking. Additionally, members of the research team have considerable experience in the use of randomised social experiments as a method for evaluating social policy.
One of the Centre’s primary goals is to contribute to the development and expansion of Australia’s capacity to undertake program evaluation generally. An important part of achieving this goal is the Centre’s active training program that promotes a firm understanding of current methods of program evaluation among interested policy makers and academics. Centre members maintain strong links with government departments, as well as with other organisations and academics engaged in social policy evaluation.
Evidence suggests that husbands and wives rarely have the same view of the family’s financial situation. Although the literature is extremely small, in general it appears that men report higher levels of income and assets than their partners, while wives report higher levels of debt (see Zarogski, 2003 and the references therein). Results diverge more with respect to assets than income, and the differential between partners generally remains constant over time.
This project will take advantage of waves 1 and 2 of the HILDA data. The data contain detailed information on family income, wealth, financial stress, labour-market status, etc. Importantly, all individuals (including teenagers over the age of 15) were in scope to be asked about financial stress and their attitude toward financial difficulties.
The measures of disagreement over incidents of family stress, attitudes toward savings goals, savings behaviour, and family prosperity will be constructed. Simple regression techniques (including binary choice models and ordered probit models) will be used to explain discord over family finances. Parallel analyses will be conducted focusing first on partners in couples and second on teenagers and their parents.
Subsequent analysis will assess the extent to which disagreement over the family’s financial situation can be linked to diminished satisfaction with one’s relationships and an increased probability of marital breakdown.
A significant proportion of Australian families experience financial difficulties at one time or another. For example, according to HILDA data approximately 19 per cent of individuals could not meet their energy payments in 2001 due to a shortage of money, while 9 per cent of individuals could not pay their mortgage or rent on time and 5 per cent of individuals went without meals for the same reason. Understanding the reasons for these financial difficulties and the impact that financial stress has on families’ labour supply, reliance on income-support and marital breakdown is important for designing better income-support policies.
This project will take advantage of waves 1 and 2 of the HILDA data. The data contain detailed information on family income, wealth, financial stress, labour-market status, etc. Importantly, individuals were also asked about their attitude toward financial difficulties.
The project will be conducted in 2 stages: During the first stage, the simple relationships between financial difficulties, labour supply (working hours), and family breakdown will be described. Simple regression techniques (including binary choice models) will be used to explain financial difficulty, working hours, income-support dependence and marital breakdown. Attitudes toward financial stress will be explicitly considered by taking advantage of HILDA’s satisfaction measures. This allows us to test whether the responses to financial difficulty depends on individuals’ satisfaction with their financial situation. Given a specific level of financial stress, responses (for example, increases in hours of work or marital breakdown) may depend on how dissatisfied individuals are with their current financial situation.
During the second stage, the relationship between financial difficulty and labour supply, income-support dependence, and martial breakdown can be further studied. The panel feature of the data will be exploited to investigate the impact of financial difficulty in wave 1 on outcomes in wave 2. To this end, a simple difference-in-difference approach will be used.
Understanding the constraints faced and choices made by parents in seeking to balance the competing interests of labour market participation and family commitments is an increasingly important contemporary research focus. A related research focus is on unraveling the complex inter-relationships between the financial incentives embedded in the Australian welfare system for low income parents with young children and their labour market choices. This project will focus especially on the labour market choices of parents with pre-school aged children aged below FIVE. The project has two specific objectives:
(i) to document how labour
force participation varies among families with young children, and to document
the prevalence of work-family balance factors that can potentially impact on
young children.
(ii) to analyze more formally the determinants of labour market participation
and hours of labour supply of parents with young children, especially the specific
choices made by the primary carer.
This study will be principally based on the HILDA data set. But for part (i), alternative data sources, particularly ABS data series on labour force participation will also be used. The analysis in part (i) will be based on tabular descriptions to highlight the correlations between labour force participation and specific circumstances of the families. It will also highlight changes in the work patterns of parents with young children between the two Waves of the data and discuss the various transitions made between the two waves.
Part (ii) will employ formal discrete choice models (binary probit and multinomial logit) in order to uncover the underlying determinants of various labour force participation status. In addition, it will employ regression techniques to model the hours of work decisions of parents.
This project examines the patterns of social and economic engagement, family formation and accommodation arrangements that support or hinder the transition to self-reliance in adult life.
This research proposes to review and – more importantly synthesize – both the international and Australian literature on the path to self-reliance for young people (until age 25). Rather than simply summarizing the literature, we will pursue a meta analysis. Meta analysis to some extent will allow us to quantify the various research findings in the literature whenever multiple studies of a particular issue have been conducted.
The study will focus in
particular on:
· assessing those factors that are likely to be relevant and important
for Australia;
· consideration of the evidence on the effect of government policies
and intervention;
· evaluating the strength/validity of the existing evidence;
· identifying those areas where additional research is required.
What is the impact of social participation on the economic and personal outcomes achieved by individuals? Does participation in social activities increase the likelihood individuals will engage in economic participation one year later? Does subsequent economic participation depend on the forms and intensity of the social participation? What is the impact of social participation on the subsequent well-being and life satisfaction levels reported by individuals?
The Federal Government has implemented reforms designed to encourage income support recipients to engage in social participation activities as one way to promote greater eventual participation in economic activities. Social participation may also lead to better non-economic outcomes for individuals, in terms of general well-being and life satisfaction. This study will assess the strength of the relationship between social participation and subsequent outcomes among a representative sample of Australian income support recipients. It will build on the analysis and results of the 2003 From Social to Economic Participation SPEAR project, but analyse data from a more representative group of income support recipients, analyse their outcomes over a longer time period and encompass a broader range of outcome measures.
The proposed study would use data from the first and second waves of HILDA. The proposal is to use information about individual participation in social activities in the first wave to assess its impact on participation in economic activities and other outcomes one year later in the second wave. The research methodology would be similar to that used in the 2003 From Social to Economic Participation SPEAR project. That is, it will involve three forms of analysis. The first involves identifying the extent and form of social participation undertaken by income support recipients in wave one of the HILDA data. The second involves the preparation of simple comparisons of wave two outcomes according to the wave one activities undertaken by individuals. The third involves the use of matching estimators to estimate the impact of social participation on outcomes by comparing those who participate with those most like them who do not.
This project is about analysing the Disability Support Pension New Claimants Survey (DSPNCS). The data set consists of 1000 New Entrants into the Disability Support Pension. The project aims to find out:
a) how the individuals
came to claim disability support, i.e. whether they have previously been on
income support or whether something happened to them during their last job,
b) whether they are receiving sufficient support in the sense of education /
rehabilitation help,
c) what their previous labour market experiences have been, and
d) what their current level of social participation is.
We will attempt to find out if there are any typical pathways to disability support and whether there are common themes about the way the lives of those on disability support pension evolve after entering the program.
The methods we will use will be simple data techniques to find typical lives (cross-tabulations) and standard accounting techniques (simple duration analyses and discounting) to calculate such statistics as the average number of jobs and previous income support spells before flowing into disability support. Our main job will be to insert knowledge of other income support groups in Australia and to give some perspective on the numbers we find.
There is limited understanding of the role of financial incentives on the transitions into partnerships and on the duration of the partnerships among those on income support. We do know however that there is a high rate of partnering and a high rate of partnership dissolution among this group.
It is not clear whether the high rate of partnership breakdown is due to the financial pressures of low income, policy and program parameters that provide more generous income support for single parent families and single individuals, or to the characteristics of the particular population. This project will try to make some progress in separating out these factors.
In summary this paper seeks
to understand better
· the extent to which financial incentives affect the rate and duration
of partnering within the income support system and
· the extent to which partnering within the welfare system affects income
support reliance.
We anticipate that this research will develop our understanding of the factors that affect welfare reliance of families, and in encouraging or discouraging economic and social participation
It will identify factors that influence the long term welfare reliance of families, including the importance of life cycle events, changes in family structure, and individual characteristics.
Organisation and Management of the Unit
A Research Management Committee oversees the activities of the Centre. The Committee is composed of representatives from FaCS and the Economics Group, RSSS.
Deborah Cobb-Clark
Director
