Understanding how the Australian labour market works, with examples from the COVID-19 era - A talk to the 2025 Australian Labour Market Research Workshop

Abstract

This article is about how to understand labour markets. I suggest an overall framework for doing analysis of labour markets and give a detailed treatment of several elements: asking questions, how to think about the causes of changes in labour market outcomes and using descriptive information to evaluate causality. To illustrate these approaches, I use examples taken from my research on Australia’s labour market in the COVID-19 era.