Back-to-front Down-under? Part-time/Full-time Wage Differentials in Australia

Alison Booth and Margi Wood

No 482, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: In 2003, part-time employment in Australia accounted for over 42% of the Australian female workforce, nearly 17% of the male workforce, and represented 28% of total employment. Of the OECD countries, only the Netherlands has a higher proportion of working women employed part-time and Australia tops the OECD league in terms of its proportion of working men who are part-time. In this paper we investigate part-time full-time hourly wage gaps using important new panel data from the new Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. We find that the usual negative part-time wage penalty found in other countries is not found in Australia once unobserved individual heterogeneity has been taken into account. Instead, part-time men and women typically earn an hourly pay premium. This result survives our numerous robustness checks and we advance some hypotheses as to why there is a positive part-time pay premium.

Keywords: part-time, full-time; efficiency hours; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2004-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Back-to-front Down-under? Part-time/Full-time Wage Differentials in Australia (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:dpaper:482

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