The emerging role of Financial Counsellors in supporting Older Persons in financial hardship and with management of Consumer‐directed Care packages within Australia

The role of financial counsellors as providers of information, support and advocacy for those in financial difficulty is a well established mechanism in the mainstream welfare landscape in Australia. In general, the role of financial counsellors is in helping people alleviate or resolve their financial difficulties through improvement of their financial literacy. It is recognised as an important component of policy responses to assist low‐income households and individuals in financial stress. The use of financial counsellors for older persons (i.e., those aged 65+ years), however, appears to be underutilised. Financial hardship and abuse of older persons within our community are becoming key issues as the population of Australia “ages”. Existing evidence also suggests that service providers alone do not have adequate skills to address these issues. This paper firstly examines the development of financial counselling in Australia. It then examines the newly emerging role of financial counselling in supporting older persons in addressing barriers to financial literacy and then in navigating the complex landscape of aged care service provision. The current financialisation, marketisation and complexities of consumer‐directed care are identified as key contextual factors. The paper will then discuss an evaluation study of the provision of financial counselling to the older person population designed to support financial hardship and navigation of the complex aged care services system. The findings of the paper are based on an evaluation of the Financial Consumer Rights Council (FCRC), Victoria: Dignity and Debt Financial Difficulty and Getting Older initiative. This pilot initiative included older persons from both community‐based and aged care residential facilities in one regional area of Victoria. The initiative, conducted over 2016, was designed to assess the effectiveness of one‐on‐one financial counselling sessions with older persons that provided consumer advocacy and information about support services and entitlements (including hardship protections) associated with ageing. The evaluation found that the provision of financial counselling to the older person population could be a key mechanism in improving overall financial literacy, avoiding periods of financial hardship and in maintaining financial well‐being, quality of life and positive ageing. Findings also demonstrated a need for an expanded outreach financial counselling model to better service older persons in more isolated living environments and/or with mobility impairments living in the community, and the potential to situate offices of financial counsellors within medical centres (a space often visited by the ageing population), to co‐situate financial health check‐ups as an overall element of health and well‐being. As such, financial counselling was viewed as well placed to support older persons in improvement of financial literacy and in supporting navigation of the increasingly complex marketised and consumer‐directed care (CDC) landscape of aged care service provision in Australia.     

Adult women and ADHD: On the temporal dimensions of ADHD identities

This paper uses conceptual resources drawn from psychosocial process thinking (Brown & Reavey, 2015; Brown & Stenner, 2009; Stenner, 2017) and from G.H. Mead in particular, to contribute to an emerging body of work on the experiences of adult women with ADHD (Horton‐Salway & Davies, 2018; Quinn & Madhoo, 2014; Singh, 2002; Waite & Ivey, 2009). It has a particular focus on how ADHD features in the construction of women's identities and life‐stories and it draws upon findings from a qualitative investigation of adult women diagnosed or self‐diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A theoretically informed ‘thematic decomposition’ of 16 depth interviews reveals how complex processes of identity transformation are mediated by the social category of ADHD. Through this process, troubled pasts are reconstructed from the perspective of an ‘emergent’ identity that offers participants the potential for a more enabling and positive future.     

Time Insensitivity for Protective Investments

Investments in protective measures involve an initial immediate cost in exchange for a stream of potential benefits accruing over time in the form of reduced expected losses. This paper describes two studies in which individuals were asked both to make choices and indicate the maximum amount they were willing to pay (WTP) for such protective measures. By varying the number of years that the measures provided protection, we observed four different decision strategies that individuals use to determine their maximum WTP. The findings from these experiments strongly suggest that most individuals do not take into account the added benefits of having a protective measure in place over a longer period of time when determining the likelihood of purchasing protection or the maximum price they are willing to pay. The behavior of a relatively small proportion of the subjects was consistent with a discounted utility model. Most subjects were either myopic in their behavior or did not change their maximum WTP as the time horizon changed. Despite the fact that most subjects were insensitive to time changes, they were generally willing to purchase the protective measures. Implications of these results for investment in risk mitigation measures are briefly explored.     

A Bayesian-loss function-based method in assessing loss caused by ship-source oil spills in the arctic area

It is difficult to assess the risk of ship-source oil spills in Arctic waters for insurance purposes due to many unknowns and the lack of reliable data. However, maritime activities in the Arctic area continue to grow, indicating the urgent needs for the development of innovative methods to estimate loss from potential ship-source oil spills in the Arctic area. To fill this gap, we develop a hybrid Bayesian-loss function-based method to assess ship-source oil spill-related loss and implement an illustrative test on Baffin Island, Nunavut in Canada. The results confirm that our method can accurately assess loss and, subsequently, develop reliable insurance premiums for shipping activities in the Arctic area. This enables governmental and nongovernmental organizations alike to use the method as a reliable loss estimation mechanism for ship-source oil spills. Also, it is a valuable tool in designing measures for safer and more resilient Arctic shipping.     

Higher Order Properties of Gmm and Generalized Empirical Likelihood Estimators

In an effort to improve the small sample properties of generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators, a number of alternative estimators have been suggested. These include empirical likelihood (EL), continuous updating, and exponential tilting estimators. We show that these estimators share a common structure, being members of a class of generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimators. We use this structure to compare their higher order asymptotic properties. We find that GEL has no asymptotic bias due to correlation of the moment functions with their Jacobian, eliminating an important source of bias for GMM in models with endogeneity. We also find that EL has no asymptotic bias from estimating the optimal weight matrix, eliminating a further important source of bias for GMM in panel data models. We give bias corrected GMM and GEL estimators. We also show that bias corrected EL inherits the higher order property of maximum likelihood, that it is higher order asymptotically efficient relative to the other bias corrected estimators.     

Efficient Semiparametric Estimation via Moment Restrictions

Conditional moment restrictions can be combined through GMM estimation to construct more efficient semiparametric estimators. This paper is about attainable efficiency for such estimators. We define and use a moment tangent set, the directions of departure from the truth allowed by the moments, to characterize when the semiparametric efficiency bound can be attained. The efficiency condition is that the moment tangent set equals the model tangent set. We apply these results to transformed, censored, and truncated regression models, e.g., finding that the conditional moment restrictions from Powell's (1986) censored regression quantile estimators can be combined to approximate efficiency when the disturbance is independent of regressors.     

Quantifying the costs of drought: new evidence from life satisfaction data

We estimate the cost of droughts by matching rainfall data with individual life satisfaction. Our context is Australia over the period 2001 to 2004, which included a particularly severe drought. Using fixed-effect models, we find that a drought in spring has a detrimental effect on life satisfaction equivalent to an annual reduction in income of A$18,000. This effect, however, is only found for individuals living in rural areas. Using our estimates, we calculate that the predicted doubling of the frequency of spring droughts will lead to the equivalent loss in life satisfaction of just over 1% of GDP annually.

Exact and resampling probability values for the Piccarreta nominal–ordinal index of association

Exact, resampling, and Pearson type III permutation methods are provided to compute probability values for Piccarreta's nominal–ordinal index of association. The resampling permutation method provides good approximate probability values based on the proportion of resampled test statistic values equal to or greater than the observed test statistic value.     

Knowledge and Beliefs About Gambling in Australian Secondary School Students and their Implications for Education Strategies

This study investigated the nature of gambling-related knowledge and beliefs in a survey study of 2,669 students aged 13–17 years in South Australia. Students were classified as pathological gamblers, at risk, or not at risk based upon the DSM-IV-J, and their responses to questions relating to objective odds, probabilities, and common misperceptions were compared. The study confirmed previous studies which have shown that pathological gamblers are more susceptible to erroneous beliefs concerning randomness and chance, but do not differ in terms of their knowledge of objective odds. These findings were discussed in terms of Ladouceur’s notion of “cognitive switching” and the distinction drawn between “hot” and “cold” cognitions in clinical outcome studies. The implications for school-based education programs are examined with attention given to the potential value of role-playing and simulations in encouraging student reflection and self-awareness.