Cutting working conditions won’t get us out of the current malaise, writes Andrew Leigh.

It’s the love child of economics and psychology – behavioural economics. It tries to explain people’s rational, or better irrational, behaviour when it comes to financial decision-making and consumption patterns. On Big Ideas, two experts outline the main lessons of behavioural economics and discuss the ways that it has affected policymaking in Australia. Could it...

This paper compares the tax systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, and summarizes the evidence about top income shares.

Australia’s top earners have increased their share of income more than three fold over the last three decades, according to updated research based on a 2006 paper. The study, conducted by ANU economist Professor Andrew Leigh from the Research School of Economics, in conjunction with Oxford University’s Sir Tony Atkinson, used taxation statistics to estimate...

A common critique of most measures of income inequality, which are based on a single year's income, is that they fail to take account of income mobility. If income fluctuations are large, and individuals can smooth consumption, then high inequality and high mobility may be no worse than low inequality and low mobility. To test...