Railways and the Exploitation of Victoria's Forests, 1880s–1920s

Railways made a large contribution to the expansion of Victoria's economy, and in the process enabled and drove environmental change. This article focuses on one industry, forestry. It first examines railway demand for timber in construction and maintenance, particularly for sleepers. This demand caused tensions – a bitter dispute in the 1890s between the Railways Department and the Conservator of Forests, George Perrin, over timber cut on state land led to uneasy co-existence after the turn of the century. Railways not only required timber but also carried commercial quantities in bulk, providing forest industries with access to profitable markets – in particular firewood, the significance of which has been underappreciated previously. Forest products contributed substantially to railway revenue, representing a more stable source of income than other major categories of freight such as wheat, wool, and coal.     

Relationship between positive psychological capital and creative performance

Despite considerable attention to the creative process and its relationship with personal characteristics, there is no published study focused directly on the relationship between the recently recognized core construct of psychological capital (PsyCap) and creative performance. Drawing from a large (N = 899) and heterogeneous sample of working adults, this study investigates PsyCap and its components (i.e., efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) as predictors of creative performance. Overall PsyCap predicted creative performance over and above each of the four PsyCap components. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are considered. Copyright © 2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender, emotion and power in work relationships

We offer a theoretical account of how gender and emotion combine to influence the development of power in work relationships. We document the profound impact gender has on the display, perception and evaluation of emotion in the workplace. We illustrate the reciprocal relationship between emotion and power, and identify cycles of powerlessness that prevent women from developing and leveraging power in their work relationships. By exploring the nexus of gender, emotion and power in work relationships, we offer new insights into how the gendering of emotion creates and perpetuates gender differences in power in organizations. Implications for research and practice are offered.     

Backcasting energy futures using industrial ecology

Backcasting has been widely used for developing energy futures. This paper explores the potential for using industrial ecology to guide the development of energy futures within a backcasting framework. Building on the backcasting work of Robinson [1], a seven step method is presented to embed industrial ecology principles within the development and assessment of future scenarios and transition paths toward them. The approach is applied to the case of backcasting regional energy futures in the Latrobe Valley, near Melbourne, Australia. This region has substantial brown coal deposits which are currently mined and used in coal-fired power stations to generate electricity. Bounded by a sustainability vision for the region in a carbon-constrained world, regional industrial ecologies in 2050 were backcast around three themes: bio-industries and renewables (no coal usage); electricity from coal with carbon capture and storage (low to high coal usage); and coal to products such as hydrogen, ammonia, diesel, methanol, plastics and char (demonstrating medium to high overall coal use relative to current levels). Potential environmental, technological, socio-political and economic impacts of each scenario across various life cycle stages were characterised. Results offer a platform for regional policy development to underpin deliberation on a preferred future by the community, industry and other stakeholders. Industrial ecology principles were found to be useful in backcasting for creatively articulating alternative futures featuring industrial symbiosis. However, enabling the approach to guide implementation of sustainable transition pathways requires further development and would benefit from integration within the Strategic Sustainable Development framework of Robèrt et al. [2].     

Parallel machine replacement under horizon uncertainty

Construction projects usually get delayed for several time periods. When the planning horizon of a project is extended, projections for purchase and salvage of machinery within the planning horizon become inaccurate and less beneficial and often lead to unexpected costs. In this article, we formulate a parallel machine replacement (PMR) problem as a two-stage stochastic program with an uncertain planning horizon. We consider renting as an alternative to purchasing and maintaining the machinery. We show the application of the model through a case study in construction projects. Through numerical analysis, we derive managerial implications and show the value of the stochastic model.     

U.S. House Prices over the Last 30 Years: Bubbles,Regime Shifts and Market (In)Efficiency

This paper studies U.S. house prices across 45 metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2012. It applies a version of the Gordon dividend discount model for long‐run “fundamentals” and uses Mean Group and Pooled Mean Group estimation to estimate long‐run and short‐run determinants of house prices. We find great similarity across cities in that the long‐run house prices are largely explained by the same fundamentals; the long‐run rent to price ratio is approximately 5% plus 0.75 times the real interest rate (which is on the order of 2%). However, adjustments to deviations from the fundamentals are slow, in the long‐run, closing the gap at a rate of around 10% per year. We find sharp differences in short‐run adjustments (momentum) away from the fundamentals across cities, and the differences are correlated with local supply elasticities (more momentum with lower elasticity). Analysis of residuals suggests strong cyclical deviations, which are mean‐reverting.     

An assessment of the economic and environmental potential of biomass production in an agricultural region

The establishment of deep-rooted perennial species and their processing for biomass-based products such as renewable energy can have benefits for both local and global scale environmental objectives. In this study, we assess the potential economic viability of biomass production in the South Australian River Murray Corridor and quantify the resultant benefits for local and global scale environmental objectives. We model the spatial distribution of economically viable biomass production in a Geographic Information System and quantify the model sensitivity and uncertainty using Monte Carlo analysis. The total potentially viable area for biomass production under the Most Likely Scenario is 360,728 ha (57.7% of the dryland agricultural area), producing over 3 million tonnes of green biomass per annum, with a total Net Present Value over 100 years of A$ 88 million. The salinity in the River Murray could be reduced by 2.65 EC (μS/cm) over a 100-year timeframe, and over 96,000 ha of land with high wind erosion potential could be stabilised over a much shorter period. With sufficient generating capacity, our Most Likely Scenario suggests that economically viable biomass production could reduce carbon emissions by over 1.7 million tonnes per annum through the production of renewable energy and a reduced reliance on coal-based electricity generation. Our analyses suggest that biomass production is a potentially viable alternative agricultural system that can have substantial local scale environmental benefits with complimentary global scale benefits for climate change mitigation.     

Design efficiency for non‐market valuation with choice modelling: how to measure it,what to report and why*

We review the basic principles for the evaluation of design efficiency in discrete choice modelling with a focus on efficiency of WTP estimates from the multinomial logit model. The discussion is developed under the realistic assumption that researchers can plausibly define a prior belief on the range of values for the utility coefficients. D‐, A‐, B‐, S‐ and C‐errors are compared as measures of design performance in applied studies and their rationale is discussed. An empirical example based on the generation and comparison of fifteen separate designs from a common set of assumptions illustrates the relevant considerations to the context of non‐market valuation, with particular emphasis placed on C‐efficiency. Conclusions are drawn for the practice of reporting in non‐market valuation and for future work on design research.