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.     

Access to Flexible Working and Informal Care

We use matched employer–employee data to explore the relationship between employees’ access to flexible working arrangements and the amount of informal care they provide to sick or elderly friends and relatives. Flexitime and the ability to reduce working hours are each associated with about 13% more hours of informal care. Workplaces do not respond to the presence of carers by providing flexible work, instead there is some underlying selection of carers into flexible workplaces. The wider workplace environment beyond formal flexible work may also facilitate care.     

Investigating regional house price convergence in the United States: Evidence from a pair-wise approach

In this paper we examine long-run house price convergence across US states using a novel econometric approach advocated by Pesaran (2007) and Pesaran et al. (2009). Our empirical modelling strategy employs a probabilistic test statistic for convergence based on the percentage of unit root rejections among all state house price differentials. Using a sieve bootstrap procedure, we construct confidence intervals and find evidence in favour of convergence. We also conclude that speed of adjustment towards long-run equilibrium is inversely related to distance.     

Entrepreneurship,novel combinations,capital regrouping,and the structure-agency relationship: an introduction to the special issue on innovation and Austrian economics

This introduction outlines some key aspects of an Austrian perspective on innovation, which is viewed as an ongoing, dynamic process in which entrepreneurs combine heterogeneous capital resources in new ways order to develop and deploy new technologies, products, and methods of business organisation. It goes on to introduce the contributions to this special issue on Austrian economics and innovation.

     

Does housework lower wages? Evidence for Britain

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to present the first estimates of the housework-wage relationship in Britain. Controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity, we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women, both married and single, who work full-time. Among women working part-time, only single women suffer a housework penalty. The housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full-time jobs but some part-time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others. We find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present.     

Endogenous trade bloc formation in an asymmetric world

This paper investigates how variations in endowments and the structure of preferences impact on the coalition formation decisions of asymmetric countries. There exist relatively few general results on the relationship between country characteristics and trade bloc formation. Here, new light is shed on this issue by systematically simulating bloc formation and by explicitly analysing the blocking behaviour of coalitions. A general equilibrium model of world trade is implemented with equilibrium coalition formation being modelled using the equilibrium concept of the core. It is found that global free trade is observed when all countries are similar. Customs unions tend to form between countries with ‘adjacent’ consumer preferences or with ‘adjacent’ endowments of their export commodity. Finally, in contrast to the existing literature but consistent with observed behaviour, it is found that free trade areas often Pareto dominate customs unions, provided consumer preferences differ sufficiently.