‘It's not acceptable for the husband to stay at home': Taking a discourse analytical approach to capture the gendering of work

This article illustrates some of the ways in which the notion of (paid) work is actively being gendered, and how these gendering processes take place not only through organizational practices but also in discourses that circulate outside an organization in the private domain. Drawing on 15 in‐depth interviews with women who opted out of their own professional career in order to accompany their husbands on their overseas work assignment to Hong Kong, we demonstrate some of the benefits of using a discourse analytical approach to capturing and identifying the processes through which these women actively (although not necessarily consciously) gender the notion of work, thereby reinforcing the gender order and its male bias. We argue that identifying and making visible these gendered and gendering practices is an important component of, and a potential trigger for, change both in organizations as well as private contexts.     

The moral hazard of conditionality: Restoring the integrity of social security law

This article examines the extent to which the Australian and UK social security systems meet their legal obligations to provide basic relief to citizens in need. Conditionality and “mutual obligation” are at the core of both the UK and Australian social security systems and are based on the concept of moral hazard, the goal being to ensure that claimants do not consider living on benefits to be preferable to engaging in paid work. Yet, we argue that the element of “mutuality” is missing in both systems; welfare claimants are subject to myriad conditions and obligations, whilst the state operates free of any legal responsibility to provide even basic relief to those in need, to prevent or alleviate extreme poverty and destitution. We outline the extent to which Australian and UK social security laws require governments to relieve destitution, examining both domestic and human rights law. We conclude that legal protections are weak and that both systems fail to meet the basic conditions of humanity toward their citizens. On this basis, we argue that such failings demonstrate a lack of integrity which undermines the standing of both the UK and Australia to invoke a claim of moral hazard to defend claimant conditionality.     

THE REPLACEMENT PROBLEM IN FRICTIONAL ECONOMIES: A NEAR‐EQUIVALENCE RESULT

We examine how technological change affects wage inequality and unemployment in a calibrated model of matching frictions in the labor market. We distinguish between two polar cases studied in the literature: a “creative destruction” economy, where new machines enter chiefly through new matches and an “upgrading” economy, where machines in existing matches are replaced by new machines. Our main results are: (i) these two economies produce very similar quantitative outcomes, and (ii) the total amount of wage inequality generated by frictions is very small. We explain these findings in light of the fact that, in the model calibrated to the US economy, both unemployment and vacancy durations are very short, i.e., the matching frictions are quantitatively minor. Hence, the equilibrium allocations of the model are remarkably close to those of a frictionless version of our economy where firms are indifferent between upgrading and creative destruction, and where every worker is paid the same market‐clearing wage. These results are robust to the inclusion of machine‐specific or match‐specific heterogeneity into the benchmark model. (JEL: J41, J64, O33)     

The state intervenes in the battle of the sexes: Causal effects of paternity leave

Do family policies influence attitudes and behavior or are they merely reflections of pre-existing attitudes? We consider the implementation of the Norwegian daddy quota, 4 weeks of parental leave reserved for the father, as a natural experiment, and examine the long-run causal effects on attitudes toward gender equality, on conflicts and sharing of household labor, and on support for public childcare. We find that respondents who had their last born child just after the reform report an 11% lower level of conflicts over household division of labor and that they are 50% more likely to equally divide the task of washing clothes than respondents who had their last child just before the reform.     

Trend effects on perceived avalanche hazard

Hazard-level forecasts constitute an important risk mitigation tool to reduce loss of economic values and human life. Avalanche forecasts represent an example of this. As for many other domains, avalanche risk is communicated using a color-coded, categorical risk scale aimed at informing the public about past, current, and future risk. We report the results from three experiments in which we tested if an irrelevant past trend in forecasted avalanche danger affects perceptions of current and future avalanche risk. Our sample consisted of individuals from three different populations targeted by national avalanche warning services. All three experiments showed that the perception of avalanche risk is influenced by the trend, but that the effect is opposite for perceptions of current and expectations of future avalanche risk. While future avalanche risk is extrapolated in the same direction as the change from the previous day, we found that perceived current risk appears to be based on an average of past and current risk. These effects diminish when we provide participants with a scale indicating the exact level of avalanche danger. For most of our measurement instruments, however, the effects remain significant. These results imply that targeted populations may consider historic information more than was intended by the sender. As such, our results have implications for both avalanche warning services and risk communication in general.     

When what you have is not enough—Acquiring Australian qualifications to overcome non-recognition of overseas skills

Skilled migration is an important strategy in developed economies seeking to address skills shortages and population ageing. Research on the labour market outcomes of skilled migrants tends to focus on employers' devaluation of skills without considering the role of immigration policy in the migration process. Moreover, there is little understanding of whether efforts to meet employer demands for local qualifications improve labour market outcomes. Drawing on a study on skilled migrants sponsored under the State-Specific and Regional Migration Scheme in the regional state of South Australia, we explore the shaping of skills and skills recognition in the migration journey, particularly migrants' strategy of reskilling in response to employer demands for local qualifications. Our logistic regressions on the association between the acquisition of Australian qualifications and labour market outcomes reveal only marginal returns to these efforts. We argue that Australia should consider developing a more coherent skilled migration process to better harness the human capital of skilled migrants.     

The geometry of Gaussian double Markovian distributions

Gaussian double Markovian models consist of covariance matrices constrained by a pair of graphs specifying zeros simultaneously in the matrix and its inverse. We study the semi-algebraic geometry of these models, in particular their dimension, smoothness, and connectedness as well as algebraic and combinatorial properties.     

Robust variable selection with application to quality of life research

A large database containing socioeconomic data from 60 communities in Austria and Germany has been built, stemming from 18,000 citizens’ responses to a survey, together with data from official statistical institutes about these communities. This paper describes a procedure for extracting a small set of explanatory variables to explain response variables such as the cognition of quality of life. For better interpretability, the set of explanatory variables needs to be very small and the dependencies among the selected variables need to be low. Due to possible inhomogeneities within the data set, it is further required that the solution is robust to outliers and deviating points. In order to achieve these goals, a robust model selection method, combined with a strategy to reduce the number of selected predictor variables to a necessary minimum, is developed. In addition, this context-sensitive method is applied to obtain responsible factors describing quality of life in communities.     

The Copula Information Criteria

We derive two types of Akaike information criterion (AIC)‐like model‐selection formulae for the semiparametric pseudo‐maximum likelihood procedure. We first adapt the arguments leading to the original AIC formula, related to empirical estimation of a certain Kullback–Leibler information distance. This gives a significantly different formula compared with the AIC, which we name the copula information criterion. However, we show that such a model‐selection procedure cannot exist for copula models with densities that grow very fast near the edge of the unit cube. This problem affects most popular copula models. We then derive what we call the cross‐validation copula information criterion, which exists under weak conditions and is a first‐order approximation to exact cross validation. This formula is very similar to the standard AIC formula but has slightly different motivation. A brief illustration with real data is given.