Australian immigration policy, in common with the US and Canada, has increased the emphasis on skill based selection criteria. A key premise of this policy is that skilled immigrants are more employable and can add to the productive capacity of the economy. However, this e¤ect will be diminished if immigrants are working in occupations that fail to utilise their skills. We examine the extent of overeducation for recently arrived immigrants to Australia. We …nd that they are more likely to be overeducated than the native population, even if they enter on skill based visas.Overeducation is greatest for immigrants from Non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) and appears to generate lower returns to education. The incidence of overeducation is signi…cantly reduced for all immigrants if they enter with visas that are a result of a job o¤er from an employer in the recipient country.

There has been concern that the increase in non-standard or flexible employment contracts witnessed in many OECD economies is evidence of a growth in low-pay, low-quality jobs. In practice, however, it is difficult to evaluate the `quality' of flexible jobs. Previous research has either investigated objective measures of job quality such as wages and training or subjective measures such as job satisfaction. In this paper, we seek to jointly evaluate objective and subjective elements of flexible employment contracts. Specifically we develop and use an index of job quality that incorporates both subjective and objective elements. Analysis of this index demonstrates that flexible jobs are of a lower quality. However, this approach suggests that analysis of, for instance, job satisfaction alone overstates the negative impact of flexible contracts on workers.

We utilise a unique matched teacher-school data set of absenteeism records to quantify the impact of group interaction on the absence behavior of primary and secondary teachers. To address problems of identification our study focuses on teachers who move between schools. The estimates for movers suggest that absenteeism is influenced by prevailing group absence behaviour at the school. Our finding suggests that a worker takes one more day of absenteeism if their average coworker takes 12 more days or 8 more days absenteeism per quarter for primary school and secondary school teachers, respectively. We interpret this as evidence that worker shirking is influenced by workplace absence norms.

This paper uses panel data drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to provide new evidence of the links between unemployment, wages, job security, financial security and workers' well‐being for workers in flexible employment. Our findings indicate that workers in flexible employment encounter more unemployment and experience increased job insecurity; unemployment is associated with wage penalties. Lower wages, job insecurity and financial insecurity affect well‐being. However, these negative outcomes are mitigated by longer job tenure. Our results have implications for moves towards a flexicurity model of employment

Educational attainment, Indigenous minorities, I21, J15,