Youth wages and employment

Staff research paper

This paper by Anne Daly, Duc Nguyen-Hong, Damien Eldridge, Owen Gabbitas and Pauline McCalman was released on 16 October 1998. The paper arose from Commission consultations on its research program, which led to specific requests for work on this topic by several government departments and other organisations. The study focuses on youth employment (rather than unemployment) and examines the factors influencing the demand for youth workers, and the interaction between youth and adult employment.

Supplementary information

Subsequent to the release of the paper some supplementary information was published. In the paper reference is made to time series data and attempts which the researchers had made to estimate statistical relationships from these data (see page 59). It was stated that the attempts 'yielded unreliable estimates' and that 'The results of the various systems were highly unstable because of strong multicollinearity, particularly in the ABS wage data.'

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) requested, under the provisions of the Freedom of Information legislation, access to these results. The supplementary information have been provided to the ACTU and are hereby made generally available.

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Contents

Preliminaries
Cover, Copyright, Preface, Contents, Abbreviations, Summary

1 Scope of this study

2 Recent trends in youth employment and wages
2.1 Determinants of employment in theory
2.2 Main trends
2.3 Factors influencing these trends
2.4 Conclusion

3 A literature review
3.1 Measures of wage responsiveness of labour demand
3.2 Australian aggregate labour demand studies
3.3 Minimum wage studies
3.4 Age-based labour substitution studies
3.5 Related results: the demand for apprentices
3.6 Conclusion

4 The demand for youth labour: a cross sectional study
4.1 Modelling the demand for labour
4.2 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey
4.3 Youth wages and employment
4.4 Summing up

5 Conclusion

Appendix A Time series data sources and issues

Appendix B AWIRS 95 dataset and related issues

Appendix C Mathematical derivations

References