How the superannuation research was compiled

Research into how Australians used $38 billion they withdrew from their superannuation accounts during the first stages of the COVID pandemic is based on two extraordinarily large data sets.

The paper, entitled “Early Pension Withdrawal as Stimulus” and available here, is the first major economic analysis of the super withdrawal that became the second-largest direct stimulus program used by the Morrison government.

Economists Steven Hamilton, Geoffrey Liu and Tristram Sainsbury first drew on data held by the Australian Bureau of Statistics through the Multi-Agency Data Integration Project.

This links de-identified, individual-level data collections from agencies including the Australian Taxation Office and the Social Services Department.

The tax office was responsible for approving access to the scheme.

This was able to shed light on all 4.5 million approved applications for superannuation withdrawals under the scheme.

This gave the researchers the superannuation balance of people as of June 30, 2019, previous super contributions and past withdrawals.

It also included the occupation, whether a person had a spouse, their number of children and the income derived from wages, interest, rent and dividends.

The same data project gave researchers access to anonymous weekly pre-tax wages as well as welfare payments.

They also had access to bank transaction data from credit bureau Illion which is among the nation’s three largest credit companies.

It collects information based on credit check requests sought by more than 6000 businesses including utilities, telcos and banks.

Whenever someone triggers a credit check, Illion collects all bank transactions, including debit and credit cards, over the previous 13 weeks.

This information includes date and time of the transaction, a description of it, the type of transaction plus its value.

To protect the privacy of people, the data is collated into weekly expenditure across a series of spending categories.

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