The New Zealand Policy Research Institute (NZPRI)

Permanent link for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/10292/21347

The New Zealand Policy Research Institute (NZPRI), formerly known as the New Zealand Work Research Institute (NZWRI), provides multidisciplinary, inquiry-driven research with social impact.

Browse

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15

Babies with older siblings have a higher infection risk, but are less protected through vaccination
(The Conversation, 2026-06-03) Schober, Thomas
Kiwi Dads at Play: What Influences Fathers' Childcare Involvement in New Zealand?
(Informa UK Limited, 2025-10-13) Hennecke, Juliane; Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail; Turcu, Alexandra
Fathers' involvement in childcare plays a critical role in promoting gender equality in caregiving, supporting children's development, and enhancing men's own well-being. Yet, in many countries–including New Zealand–mothers still bear a disproportionate share of childcare responsibilities, contributing to what is known as the gender care gap. This paper examines what drives variation in paternal involvement in early childcare, using data from the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) birth cohort. We identify key factors that help and hinder fathers' engagement, such as job-related constraints, household income dynamics, and personality traits. Importantly, the analysis shows that leave-taking and daily involvement are shaped by different drivers, with, for example, conscientious fathers being more involved in daily care while simultaneously being less likely to take paternity leave. This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what shapes fathers' roles in caregiving, with implications for families, employers, and policymakers.
The World Internet Project (New Zealand) 2025
(New Zealand Policy Research Institute, Auckland, New Zealand, 2025-11-12) Chua, Serene; Meehan, Lisa; Turcu, A
Trends in Occupational Segregation Between Women and Men in New Zealand
(NZ Policy Research Institute, 2025-12-19) Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail; Schober, Thomas
[from Introduction] The changing role of women in the economy is a central feature of societal change in developed countries over the past decades. For example, in the United States female labour-force participation rose from 43.3 % in 1970 to 56.2 % in 2020 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023). Similar increases are evident across many high-income countries (Ortiz-Ospina, Tzvetkova, and Roser, 2018), including New Zealand (NZ) where female labour-force participation increased from 54.8 % in 1987 to 66.7 % in 2025 (Stats NZ, 2025). In educational attainment, women now outperform men in most OECD countries (OECD, 2024). In NZ, 44.8 % of women aged 25 to 64 years have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 34.2 % of men (OECD, 2024). Occupational segregation, however, remains persistent in developed countries (Lind and Colquhoun, 2021; Salardi, 2016; Blau, Brummund, and Liu, 2013) and has increased in parts of the developing world (Borrowman and Klasen, 2020). This matters for several reasons. At the individual level, it can limit women’s economic opportunities. At the macroeconomic level, occupational segregation could imply a misallocation of talent that impedes economic growth (Hsieh, Hurst, Jones, and Klenow, 2019).
Same Crime – Different Outcomes: Do Court Outcomes Differ Systematically by Ethnicity?
(New Zealand Policy Research Institute - Te Kāhui Rangahau Mana Taurite, 2025-11-27) Plum, Alexander; Neubert, Rosina; Chua, Serene; Turcu, Alexandra
Māori Face Harsher Sentences Than NZ Europeans for Similar Drink-driving Offences – With Lasting Consequences
(The Conversation, 2025-11-27) Plum, Alexander
Distributional Analysis of KiwiSaver Contributions
(New Zealand Policy Research Institute - Te Kāhui Rangahau Mana Taurite, 2024-04-03) Kirkpatrick, Linda; Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail
Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: What Makes and Breaks the Cycle of Advantage and Disadvantage?
(New Zealand Policy Research Institute - Te Kāhui Rangahau Mana Taurite, 2023-08-30) Iusitini, Leon; Plum, Alexander; Pacheco, Gail; Copeland, Valmai; Timmins, Jason
Learner Pathways: by Workforce Development Council
(New Zealand Policy Research Institute, 2024-10-31) Plum, Alexander; Turcu, Alexandra; Pacheco, Gail
Assessing the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Childhood Vaccine Uptake with Integrated Administrative Data
(New Zealand Work Research Institute, 2024-02-01) Iusitini, Leon; Pacheco, Gail; Schober, Thomas
This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on childhood vaccination coverage in New Zealand using population-wide administrative data. For each immunisation event from 6 weeks to 4 years, we compare children who became eligible for immunisation during the pandemic to earlier born cohorts. We find for our affected cohorts that the initial phase of the pandemic had, on average, small or nil effects on timely immunisation at the four infancy events, but a large effect at the 4-year event of -15 percentage points. Nine months after eligibility, catch-up for the affected cohort was largely achieved for the infancy immunisations, but 4-year coverage remained 6 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. Uptake initially dropped most among children of European ethnicity and of high-earning parents but catch-up quickly surpassed their Māori, Pacific, and lower-earning counterparts for whom sizeable gaps in coverage below pre-pandemic levels remained at the end of our observation period. The pandemic thus widened pre-existing inequalities in immunisation coverage.
Workforce Vaccine Mandates: The Effect on Vaccine Uptake and Healthcare Workers’ Labour Market Outcomes
(New Zealand Work Research Institute, 2024-02-28) Meehan, Lisa; Mitchell, livvy; Pacheco, Gail
As part of its COVID-19 policy response, the New Zealand government implemented vaccination mandates as a condition of ongoing employment for certain workers. This paper examines the effect of these mandates on vaccination uptake among mandated healthcare, education and corrections workers and on healthcare workers’ labour market outcomes. This is enabled by New Zealand’s linked population-wide administrative data, which includes a comprehensive national COVID-19 vaccination register linked to tax records to identify employment outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that in the context of already-high vaccination rates, workforce vaccine mandates provided limited benefit in terms of increasing vaccination rates among mandated workers. Moreover, they negatively impacted healthcare workers’ labour market outcomes, which may have had wider consequences in terms of exacerbating existing health workforce skills shortages.
Whaikaha disability support funding: Individualised funding and wellbeing outcomes
(New Zealand Work Research Institute, 2024-01-17) Kirkpatrick, Linda; Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail
[From Executive Summary] Disabled people tend to have lower wellbeing outcomes compared with their non-disabled counterparts across a range of dimensions. Providing individuals with greater autonomy over how they spend their Whaikaha funding has the potential to empower individuals to drive their wellbeing outcomes. This report, therefore, uses Stats NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to examine the wellbeing outcomes of those who receive individualised funding versus those who receive individualised funding (IF) versus those who are eligible for IF but receive only mainstream funding.
Basic Reading and Mathematics Skills and the Labour Market Outcomes of Young People: Evidence from PISA and Linked Administrative Data
(Wiley, 2023-08-01) Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail; Schober, Thomas
This paper uses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data linked to administrative data to track the educational and labour market outcomes of young people. Students with lower skills have lower rates of participation in further education. While low-skilled men out-earn their higher-skilled counterparts when they are very young, their earnings are overtaken by those with higher skills when they are in their early 20s, and they earn around 15 per cent less by the age of 25. The differences among women are substantially larger – women with low skills earn approximately 35 per cent less than their higher-skilled counterparts by age 25.
Adult Literacy and Numeracy Programmes and Labour Market Outcomes
(New Zealand Work Research Institute (NZWRI), 2023-09-05) Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail; Schober, Thomas
Having a basic level of proficiency in reading and mathematics is widely seen as a key factor to fully participate in modern societies. Many developed countries, therefore, have policies to raise the literacy and numeracy skills of adults. In this context, we evaluate adult literacy and numeracy (L+N) programmes in New Zealand. These publicly-funded programmes aim to raise adults’ skills in order to enable further learning and increase the employability and/or workplace productivity of participants. We use population-wide administrative data to estimate the effects of participation on labour market outcomes, further education and training, and workplace accidents, using matching methods to create a suitable comparison group. We examine the effects of three broad types of L+N programmes separately: Workplace LN, Intensive LN and ILN English (for speakers of other languages). For Workplace LN programmes, we find that employment and earnings increases after programme participation. However, employment and earnings actually decrease for Intensive LN and ILN English programme participants. Similarly, social welfare benefit receipt decreases among Workplace LN participants, but increases among Intensive LN and ILN English participants. However, enrolment in education and training increases after programme participation for all three programme types. Moreover, the decreases in employment for Intensive LN and ILN English participants may be due to these increases in education and training participation since a general activity indicator of whether a person is in employment, education or training shows positive results for all three programme types. There is little effect on workplace accident claims.
Explaining Ethnic Disparities in Bachelor’s Qualifications: Participation, Retention and Completion in New Zealand
(New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2017) Meehan, Lisa; Pacheco, Gail; Pushon, Z
There are substantial ethnic gaps in higher education in NZ, despite more than a decade of considerable policy effort aimed at this concern. This study uses newly linked administrative data to examine the underachievement of Māori and Pasifika relative to Europeans. We follow a population cohort born between 1990 and 1994 from school through to young adulthood to assess the relative contributions of prior academic performance, socioeconomic status and parental education to these gaps. Controlling for the relevant covariates narrows the Māori-European gap and completely eliminates the Pasifika-European gap in bachelor’s degree participation rates. Utilising Fairlie decompositions, we find that school performance is by far the largest contributor to the ethnic gaps. Low socioeconomic status and parental education are also pertinent, but less important. Our results suggest that ethnicbased policies aimed at encouraging participation are likely to have a limited effect if used in isolation, and signal the need for policy interventions earlier in the education system.

Browse

Recent Submissions