Reflections on Working with Homeless People

As a housing case manager in a homeless shelter, I work closely with homeless people every day. While there is an important place for the tools of social science in understanding the challenges they face, we should not distance ourselves emotionally from the homeless and treat them as stereotypes rather than as unique individuals. My main task in the shelter is to help the guests find their way through the almost impenetrable maze of government programs that are supposed to assist them in finding housing and work. Yet, about one-third of homeless people struggle with some form of mental illness, which adds to the complexity of serving them in a shelter. Physical disabilities, substance abuse, and criminal backgrounds create additional obstacles for a large number of homeless people. Those problems are often caused or compounded by homelessness. The primary cause of homelessness does not lie in the people themselves but in the capitalist system. Homelessness will remain a chronic problem until we create a society and economy in which accountability is localized, and communities on the scale of neighborhoods are strengthened to the point that they can respond to problems humanely.     

Perceptions,Persecution and Pity: The Limitations of Interventions for Homelessness in Developing Countries

Interventions for homelessness in developing countries are frequently negative and unhelpful. They tend to exist in an environment of hostility, suspicion and apathy towards homeless people. This environment is cultivated and enhanced by negative and derogatory language and images used by politicians, the public and the media in their portrayal of homeless people as unemployed, beggars, drunks and criminals. Findings from a recently completed study of homelessness in nine developing countries suggest that this perception is largely false. This article argues that, until the popular misconception of homeless people is corrected, even the most well‐intentioned interventions will have little long‐term effect.     

Simplifying The Big Mac Index

The Economist magazine recently introduced a major innovation to its famous Big Mac Index of currency values by adjusting for differences in incomes of countries. A recent paper (O'Brien and Ruiz de Vargas, 2017 , OR) explains clearly the workings of the new index, something overlooked by The Economist. The current article draws on OR to suggest an alternative formulation that is attractive in its simplicity.     

Business,trust and environmental information: Perceptions from consumers and retailers

This paper explores how business sees its role as a provider of information to the public about products marketed with environmental claims. This revolves around issues of depersonalised advice to customers, education of the wider public and, most crucially, justification of company activities. The author demonstrates how people criticise this information because of the way that they perceive the motives of business to colour it, rather than because of the facts it conveys. People distrust aspects of business, especially its environmental information, for these reasons but the perceived expertise of business in comparison with the lack of expertise of the public means that they have little choice but to trust the more general system of information provision. The balance of trust to doubt is precarious and an overall loss of public trust has implications for the regulation of business because self-regulation will no longer be seen as accountable and pressure may build for increasing government intervention, e.g. in eco-labelling. These issues are addressed through the use of qualitative data from in-depth interviews with green consumers and retailers.     

Is shared housing a way to reduce homelessness? The effect of household arrangements on formerly homeless people

Most single adults share housing with other adults, and living alone is considerably more expensive than living with someone else. Yet policies that discourage shared housing for formerly homeless people or people at risk of becoming homeless are common, and those that encourage it are rare. This would be understandable if such housing adversely affected its users in some way. We ask whether shared housing produces adverse effects. Our provisional answer is no. For the most part, whether a person lives alone or shares housing seems to make no difference to the outcomes we studied although shared housing is associated with reduced psychotic symptomology. We use data from ACCESS, a 5-year, 18-site demonstration project with over 6000 formerly homeless individuals as participants.     

Homelessness and the Universal Family in China

Depending on how one defines homelessness, China has either a very tiny homeless population or an extremely large one. Compared to other countries, there very few vagrants: people living on the streets of China's cities without means of support. But if one counts the people who migrated to cities without a legal permit (hukou), work as day laborers without job security or a company dormitory, and live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on the edge of cities, there are nearly 300 million homeless. Free market fundamentalism is responsible for the emergence of this sort of homelessness in China. We review China's recent new policies to tackle homelessness and offer suggestions based on the traditional Chinese wisdom, which includes the concept of the universal family (family - tian xia). Homelessness in China must be addressed as a cultural problem caused by the breakdown of ancient methods of social integration. Treating it merely as a housing deficit will fail.     

Making the Prevention of Homelessness a Priority: The Role of Social Innovation

Mass homelessness emerged in Canada in the wake of neoliberal policies that reduced government production of housing and other supportive measures. Efforts to reduce homelessness have occurred in three stages: 1) an emergency response in the 1990s that consisted mostly of investment in shelters, soup kitchens, and day programs, 2) the implementation of community plans to end homelessness, combined with the adoption of Housing First as a strategy that seeks to provide reliable shelter as a first step to anyone without it, followed by other remedial services, and 3) the recent development in Canada of early intervention strategies to prevent homelessness from its inception. The second stage was highly successful in dealing with the situation of chronically homeless adults, and many communities have begun to see reductions in homelessness. However effective, this approach does not break the cycle by intercepting potentially homeless individuals in their youth, which is when it begins for many people. Canada is at the beginning stages of the move towards a stronger focus on prevention, aided by a social innovation agenda to identify, design, test, and evaluate preventive interventions to determine which ones will be most strategically effective, setting the stage for implementation and going to scale.     

Regulation, Corporate Social Responsibility and Activism

This paper analyzes the interplay between firms' self-regulation (often denoted as corporate social responsibility) as opposed to the formal regulation of a negative externality. Firms respond to increasing activism in the market (conscious consumers that take into account the external effects of their purchase) by providing more socially responsible goods. However, because regulation is the outcome of a political process, an increase in activism might imply an inefficiently high externality level. This may happen when a majority of non-activist consumers collectively free-ride on conscious consumers. By determining a softer than optimal regulation, they benefit from the behavior of firms, yet they have access to cheaper (although less efficient) goods .     

Pictures of me: user views on their representation in homelessness fundraising appeals

There is a long‐standing ethical debate regarding the ‘right’ representation of recipients in charity marketing materials that are intended to accurately define and represent social problems whilst also prompting the maximum response in voluntary income. The study presented in this article makes a contribution to that debate by highlighting the views of charity beneficiaries regarding their representation in fundraising campaigns. Drawing on data from five focus groups conducted in cities across England, we explore the views of young homeless people regarding the images of homelessness that appeared in major charity campaigns aimed at raising money to fund homelessness services. Participants displayed a high level of reflexivity, demonstrating that they understood the issues involved with homelessness and the perceptions of people like themselves that exist in the public sphere and in the consciousness of potential donors. Although the participants held the view that maximising revenues through the use of simple, eye‐catching images is the prime goal of fundraising, they also expressed a desire for more nuanced campaigns that tell the dynamic stories of how people become homeless and the use of imagery that elicits empathy rather than merely arouses sympathy. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Individual homelessness: Entries,exits, and policy

Homelessness is part of the lives of many people. But almost no one is homeless for all or most of his or her life. The median shelter homeless spell is well under a month, and even “chronic homelessness” officially entails spells of a year or so. I model homelessness as part of people’s lives in a dynamic stochastic framework in continuous time. I can explain many empirical regularities with a parsimonious model: for instance, why the last addresses of homeless people are concentrated in a few low-rent neighborhoods, why homeless entries are hard to predict, why recidivism is common and past homelessness is a good predictor of future homelessness, why some groups recidivate more often than others, why the hazard rate for shelter exit is single-peaked, why effective homelessness prevention programs do not alter the average length of homeless spells. I also examine policy. The optimal homelessness prevention program is Pigouvian and starkly simple. With an optimal prevention program in place, optimal shelter quality maximizes a simple and intuitive expression, and insurance programs always raise social welfare. Most of the previous economics literature about homelessness has been static, but most literature about homelessness outside economics has been dynamic. This paper tries to bring the two strands of literature closer together.     

Tent City: Patterns of Informality and the Partitioning of Sacramento

Unsanctioned tent cities are increasing in number in cities throughout the western United States. Scholars explain the phenomenon as homeless people asserting their ‘right to the city’ or as ‘managed marginality’. These explanations capture much of the socio-political relationship between local government and homeless populations, but do not explain the long-term persistence of tent cities and the fluctuating nature of their visibility. A spatial history of informal encampments in Sacramento at three key moments—the founding of the city, the Great Depression and the Great Recession—reveals a long-term ebb and flow of tent cities occupying close-to-the-center, urban vacancies. Urban vacancies arise from the partitioning of the city into specific purposes, places and people, a taken-for-granted perception of how cities should be. The visibility of tent cities disrupts this aesthetic notion of stability and growth as homeless people use the tent to protest their isolation and exclusion.     

中国消费者对于企业慈善活动认知和支持度的实证研究

本项实证研究发现消费者是积极支持企业参与慈善活动的，但是企业仅参与慈善活动不能得到消费者认同。研究表明，相对于男性来说，女性对于企业慈善活动的支持度更高，而且随着年龄的增长，消费者对于慈善的支持度有所下降。同时人们自身幸福度越高，对于慈善的支持度也就越高。     

Nonlinear pricing in spatial oligopoly

A model of duopoly competition in nonlinear pricing when firms are imperfectly informed about consumer locations is analyzed. A continuum of consumers purchase a variable amount of a product from one of two firms located at the endpoints of the market. At the Nash equilibrium in quantity-outlay schedules, consumers buy the same quantities as they would from the same firm if it were a monopolist facing the same informational asymmetries, but they receive greater surplus. Hence, no efficiency gains result from competition. If consumers have the option to reveal their locations and have the firms deliver the goods, all consumers choose to reveal their locations in equilibrium. Thus, the inefficiencies from information asymmetries may not arise because firms can deliver the good to consumers. In contrast, with a monopoly seller, consumers have no incentives to reveal their locations.     

The memory of practice and the mirror of theory

An act of leadership is always an act of practical theory. We lead because we hold visions of the world as it ought to be, because of the not yet, because of the potential that we see in ideas and people. Yet, there still exists a perceived binary between leadership theory (in the strong sense) and leadership practice, a binary that divides organizations, classrooms, and the differing bodies of leadership literature. In this Symposium, Duncan Waite and his colleagues discuss the barriers they have faced in bringing theory to the educational leadership classroom, as well as the promise they feel theory holds for more productive, equitable, and humane schooling organizations.     

Adopting sustainable innovation: what makes consumers sign up to green electricity?

This paper investigates what encourages consumers to adopt a green electricity tariff. When people decide to adopt an innovation, such as green electricity, they consider not only functionality, usability, costs and intended outcomes, but also what the innovation means to them, for example, the way it reflects their identity, image, memberships, values and norms. The study reviews the theoretical frameworks of innovation adoption and consumption, and cognitive and normative behaviour, relevant to consumer adoption of pro‐environmental innovations, and develops a research framework. Through focus group discussions, a questionnaire survey with 103 respondents and an interview with 10 people, the study finds that consumers sympathetic to environmental issues do not necessarily adopt green electricity. This is due to lack of strong social norms and personal relevance, inconvenience of switching, uncertainty about the quality of green electricity and lack of accurate information. The implications of these findings for strategy, policy and future research are explored. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Bank failures caused by Large withdrawals: An explanation based purely on liquidity

In a version of the Diamond and Dybvig [Diamond, D., Dybvig, P., 1983. Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity. Journal of Political Economy 91, 401–419.] model with aggregate uncertainty, we show that there exists an equilibrium with the following properties: all consumers deposit at the bank, all patient consumers wait for the last period to withdraw, and the bank fails with strictly positive probability. Furthermore, we show that the probability of a bank failure remains bounded away from zero as the number of consumers increases.This equilibrium explains bank failures driven by extreme withdrawals solely on liquidity since they happen because both banks and depositors are illiquid. Furthermore, it does not require much of the elements typically emphasized, including: consumers well informed about the true state of nature, a non-zero consumption after a crisis, consumers’ panic and sunspots. We therefore think that aggregate risk in Diamond-Dybvig-like environments can be an important element to explain bank crises.     

Audit Quality and Banks' Assessment of Disclosed Accounting Information

The objective of this paper is to investigate whether banks view the information on the off-balance sheet liabilities (specifically, operating leases) disclosed in the notes to the financial statements as more reliable when it is audited by brand name auditors (i.e. a Big 4 audit firm). To the extent that banks assess a higher likelihood that the financial statements could have material misstatements if it is not audited by a Big 4 audit firm, they should charge a higher interest rate on private loans. Our findings suggest that the impact of operating leases on the interest rate is higher if the firm is audited by non-Big 4 audit firms.     

Homelessness in Dublin: An Irish Urban Disorder

A bstract . Urban homelessness in Dublin has emerged as one of Ireland's most serious socioeconomic problems. Etiological explanations for the estimated 1,200 homeless individuals in the capital range from personal problems to the structure of Irish society. Empirical examination reveals that many Irish are drawn into the homeless network through personal crises such as poor health, alcoholism, economic deprivation , and psychiatric disturbances. However, it is the inequitable social, economic, political , and legislative system which ordinarily entraps them in this deprived state. Thus the causes of Irish homelessness are fundamentally structural. The Irish Government has no policy or program for assisting the urban homeless. Consequently, they have become wards of charitable agencies ill-equipped to care properly for them. Reform legislation seems to be needed. But public apathy and prejudice suggests that it will not be enacted soon.     

All Bachelors are Unmarried Men (p < 0.05)

This paper adds to the list of criticisms against null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). I argue that when researchers do not analyze the conceptual relations among their variables, they may fail to distinguish between logical implications and empirical relations. It does not make sense to use significance testing on hypotheses involving conceptually related phenomena. The widespread lack of conceptual clarification also leads to very small effect sizes in psychology because it causes study participants to understand the stimulus material in different ways. Therefore, they answer in an inconsistent way. Researchers show an extremely low degree of ambition when they seek to show that psychological phenomena differ from chance, or when they try to disprove a hypothesis claiming that a psychological phenomenon does not exist. I see significance testing as a poor solution to the problem of tiny effect sizes in psychology. I recommend that psychological researchers be more explicit both about their main hypotheses and their auxiliary hypotheses. As examples, I analyse all quantitative articles in Issue 1, 2005 of the Journal of Health Psychology.     

WHO PAYS FOR WHEELCHAIRS?

The issue opened up by the 'Ryanair Case' is a wide and important one. Interest groups often press for special treatment at the expense of others. People often agree to give it, because they think the group is deserving and because they have not thought through how the service is to be paid for. By making the charging transparent, as Ryanair has done in this case, people will be forced to think about whether the interest group really is deserving, and if they decide that it is, face up to supporting that view with their own money.