Introducing ‘Journeys Home’

Homelessness, despite being a major social policy issue in Australia, is an area that is not well served by data. Most sorely lacking is any large‐scale panel study that follows a broad sample of persons with recent experience of homelessness and unstable housing histories. In 2010, the Australian Government set about rectifying this deficiency when it commissioned the Melbourne Institute to undertake a new panel study, now known as ‘Journeys Home’. This study draws its sample from the population of Centrelink income‐support recipients, targeting persons identified in the administrative data as having recent experience of homelessness, as well as others with similar characteristics who may be vulnerable to housing difficulties in the future. This article summarises the design of this new study and reports on fieldwork outcomes from the first two waves of data collection.     

A Sectoral Approach Balancing Global Efficiency and Equity

This paper explores the idea that a properly designed sectoral approach could be the answer to two sets of constraints that hinder international agreements on climate change, namely a genuine concern from developing countries for economic growth and competitiveness issues from industrialized countries. Our sectoral approach builds on three premises: (i) cap-and-trade systems are established in industrialized countries and intensity targets in developing countries, (ii) sectors subject to international trade abide by the rules of the countries in which they trade and (iii) a fraction of the revenues from permits in industrialized countries go towards carbon mitigation in developing countries. We design an economic model that features interactions in three carbon-intensive sectors (two of which are internationally traded) and two countries (an industrialized country and a developing country). Two scenarios are constructed: an Enhanced Sectoral Approach, which refers to our proposal, and a Global Cap, which implements a uniform CO₂ price. We compare the two scenarios in terms of total welfare and equity. It is shown that, for a minor global welfare loss, the Enhanced Sectoral Approach ranks high in terms of equity for emerging countries. This approach also eliminates competitiveness and leakage issues.     

Information processing and leadership styles: Constructive thinking and transformational leadership

Transformational leaders increase job satisfaction and well‐being among workers. According to the cognitive‐experiential self‐theory (CEST), all behavior is guided by two information‐processing systems: a rational and an experiential system. Study 1 examined the relationship between information processing and transformational leadership among experienced school leaders (N = 183). The rational system had a strong positive correlation with transformational leadership, whereas the experiential system was weakly correlated. Study 2 (N = 126) examined constructive thinking and transformational leadership. Global constructive thinking, emotional coping, and behavioral coping all had strong positive correlations with transformational leadership. These results suggest that improving leaders' awareness of their own information‐processing and thinking systems might encourage more productive transformational‐leadership techniques.     

Does china income FSDs follow Benford? A comparison between Chinese income first significant digit distribution with Benford distribution

Since Benford’s law is an empirical phenomenon that occurs in a range of data sets, this raises the question as to whether or not the same thing might be true in terms of the Chinese income distribution data. We focus on the first significant digit (FSD) distribution of Chinese micro income data from the 2005 Inter-Census sample, which corresponds to 1% of Chinese population and other micro income data from the China family panel studies (CFPS) and Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). We use information theoretic-entropy based methods to investigate the degree to which Benford’s FSD law is consistent with the FSD of Chinese income data and our findings suggest consistency between the Chinese FSD income distribution and Benford’s distribution. The close connection between the two distributions has implications for the quality of the sample of Chinese micro data.