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Both a healthy lifestyle and financially responsible behavior contribute to individual wellbeing and benefit society. Motivated by the fact that both types of behavior involve short‐term sacrifices in exchange for uncertain long‐term benefits and require self‐control, we examine individuals' consistency in behavior across the health and financial domains. Using a large‐scale data set of 3,752 employed Australians, we find that the majority of individuals behave in a consistently beneficial or detrimental way across both domains. This behavioral consistency relates to fundamental life outcomes, including physical and mental health, financial prosperity, and life satisfaction. In a new contribution to the literature, we show how personality traits—Locus of Control, the Big Five, Achievement Motivation—have a meaningful role in explaining the simultaneous pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and financially responsible behavior. These behavioral insights can guide policymakers in developing more effective strategies to steer individuals towards beneficial health and financial outcomes.

This is the first intertemporal analysis of seniors’ income elasticity of expenditure on food-away-from-home (FAFH) across age cohorts. While the expenditure behaviour of Australian seniors today is not too different from those a decade ago, today’s seniors are more homogenous in terms of the sensitivity of their FAFH spending to a change in income. The finding that seniors do not treat FAFH as a luxury good can serve as a buffer against potential declines in demand for food services in times of economic crisis and uncertainty, especially as seniors’ share of the overall population continues to grow in future years.

This study explores whether gender patterns in personality traits contribute to the gender gap in hourly wage rates, focusing on traits that reflect an individual's confidence to take on a challenge. To capture confidence, we use a psychological measurement known as Achievement Motivation, which is dually comprised of 'hope for success' and 'fear of failure'. This personality dimension is examined in addition to the Big Five personality traits and Locus of Control (LOC). Using 2013 wage data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, our Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition model reveals that men's stronger hope for success, lower fear of failure and lower agreeableness contribute to the gender wage gap, while women's higher level of conscientiousness is the only trait that serves to narrow it. JEL J31 - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials D91 - Intertemporal Consumer Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

This paper applies a dynamic multidimensional measure of disadvantage to examine how the nature and extent of disadvantage experienced by a child can vary throughout their childhood. We use two lon...

As most readers would be aware, second income earners in Australia are almost always the female partner, arising out of a social climate in which women predominantly assume the unpaid carer role and tend to occupy industries and job roles that pay less. These gender-differentiated effects mean that adjusting any element of EMTRs will tend to influence women's labour force participation more profoundly than men's - necessitating a gender-sensitive lens on policy design. My prediction is that this publication will help lay valuable foundations for the future stream of "gender-lensing" research that will be increasingly sought by contemporary policy practitioners who are attuned to the underlying drivers of gender inequities in societal and economic architecture. [Extracted from the article] email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper demonstrates the applicability of an innovative approach towards examining child disadvantage, using a holistic, dynamic measure that not only accounts for multiple sources of disadvantage but also for the recurrence and persistence of disadvantage throughout a child’s life. We analyse child disadvantage using two longitudinal surveys of the Australian child population, one of which is specific to Indigenous children, who experience notably higher rates of disadvantage. Among Australian children, we detect that poor body weight and bullying—representative of the broad dimensions of health and emotional wellbeing—should be of significant concern to policymakers. Among Indigenous children, housing conditions, schooling and exposure to risky behaviours stand out as areas of concern. By identifying the dimensions in which rates of child disadvantage are most severe, this methodological approach can help steer targeted policy actions.

Much policy attention has been placed on enhancing individuals’ financial knowledge and literacy, chiefly through financial education programs. However, managing one’s personal finances takes more than financial knowledge and literacy: an individual also needs a sense of self-assuredness, or ‘self-belief’, in their own capabilities. This personal attribute is known within the psychology literature as ‘self-efficacy’. This paper examines the significance of an individual’s financial self-efficacy in explaining their personal finance behaviour, through the application of a psychometric instrument. Using a 2013 survey of Australian women, financial self-efficacy emerges as one of the strongest predictors of the type and number of financial products that a woman holds. Specifically, our analysis reveals that women with higher financial self-efficacy – that is, with greater self-assuredness in their financial management capacities – are more likely to hold investment and savings products, and less likely to hold debt-related products. Even alongside other important factors – such as education, financial risk preferences, age and household income – the explanatory power of financial self-efficacy is found to be significant at the 1% critical level. Moreover, the significance of financial self-efficacy is independently identified from that of financial literacy factors, which bears important implications for the development of policies aiming to improve financial outcomes.

Both a healthy lifestyle and financially responsible behavior contribute to individual wellbeing and benefit society. Motivated by the fact that both types of behavior involve short-term sacrifices in exchange for uncertain long-term benefits and require self-control, we examine individuals’ consistency in behavior across the health and financial domains. Using a large-scale dataset of 3,752 employed Australians, we find that the majority of individuals behave in a consistently beneficial or detrimental way across both domains. This behavioral consistency relates to fundamental life outcomes, including physical and mental health, financial prosperity, and life satisfaction. In a new contribution to the literature, we show how personality traits – Locus of Control, the Big Five, Achievement Motivation – have a meaningful role in explaining the simultaneous pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and financially responsible behavior. These behavioral insights can guide policymakers in developing more effective strategies to steer individuals towards beneficial health and financial outcomes.

In 2004, at a time when the nation was experiencing the lowest fertility trends in its history, the Australian Federal Government introduced the offer of a cash payment of $3,000 to all women on the birth of a new baby. The maternity payment, commonly known as the baby bonus, was increased to $4,000 in 2006 and to $5,000 in 2008. While not explicitly declared a pronatalist policy at the time of its introduction, the baby bonus was later credited with helping to halt the decline of the nation’s aggregate birth rates. This paper examines the effect of this policy on Australian women’s childbearing intentions from 2001 to 2008, using panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) Survey. The results indicate that the introduction of the baby bonus coincided with a statistically significant increase in women’s childbearing intentions. More specifically, the strongest increase occurred among women from lower-income households, potentially implying that the policy had the strongest effect on women who, given their current characteristics, are relatively likely to be reliant on welfare assistance to raise their children over the long term. The inferences drawn from the paper’s findings raise concern over the capacity of the baby bonus policy to reduce aggregate dependency rates.