Beyond the Hype: Insights into Entrepreneurial Life in Australia

Much of the hype around entrepreneurship today focuses on ‘hero entrepreneurs’ – the stereotypical image of Virgin founder Richard Branson and his extroverted, risk-taking personality. Yet this picture doesn’t accurately reflect day-to-day life as an entrepreneur. It doesn’t tell us about the way ideas are born or the networks, systems and skills – not to mention plain luck – on the road to success. The aim of this project was to provide insights into the entrepreneurial ecosystem by unmasking the day-to-day realities of being an entrepreneur in Australia today. The research busts the myth that entrepreneurs succeed because of inherent personality traits – because they are born that way. This research focuses instead on the impact of ‘incubators’, the genesis of entrepreneurial ideas, the common patterns of learning and skill development, and the variety of pathways that can lead someone to being dubbed an entrepreneur. Encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship will be vital to the next wave of economic growth, now that the commodity prices boom is over. We need a deeper understanding of the role of entrepreneurs in technological change and innovation, but as importantly, the realities of entrepreneurial life in Australia

The Emergence of the ‘Social Economy’: the Australian not-for-profit sector in transition

The Not-for-Profit (NFP) sector in Australia is currently in transition. There is a growing recognition, in Australia and worldwide, that government and philanthropic funds are insufficient to address the problems facing society; as well as demands for increased accountability and demonstration of improved outcomes from traditional funding to the non-profit sector. There is also a growing global interest in social enterprises, socially responsible investment, and, in particular, impact investing – where investors aim to achieve a blend between commercial value and social impact. These trends are contributing to the emergence of new organizational forms, partnerships and financial products, and as a consequence, NFP organizations are becoming just one form of organization within the broader spectrum of organizations and activity described as the ‘social economy’. This research project begins to explore this transition by analysing a sample of organizations in Australia that while having formal non-profit structures, identified themselves as social enterprises in a bid for funding from one of Australia’s leading corporate foundations, the Westpac Foundation. The research builds on previous studies, yet also enables more detailed data on the leadership, governance, human resources, financial challenges, and focus of activities of social enterprises and raises questions about the future of the sector and the social economy

Inferring Core-Collapse Supernova Physics with Gravitational Waves

Stellar collapse and the subsequent development of a core-collapse supernova explosion emit bursts of gravitational waves (GWs) that might be detected by the advanced generation of laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatories such as Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and LCGT. GW bursts from core-collapse supernovae encode information on the intricate multi-dimensional dynamics at work at the core of a dying massive star and may provide direct evidence for the yet uncertain mechanism driving supernovae in massive stars. Recent multi-dimensional simulations of core-collapse supernovae exploding via the neutrino, magnetorotational, and acoustic explosion mechanisms have predicted GW signals which have distinct structure in both the time and frequency domains. Motivated by this, we describe a promising method for determining the most likely explosion mechanism underlying a hypothetical GW signal, based on Principal Component Analysis and Bayesian model selection. Using simulated Advanced LIGO noise and assuming a single detector and linear waveform polarization for simplicity, we demonstrate that our method can distinguish magnetorotational explosions throughout the Milky Way (D <~ 10kpc) and explosions driven by the neutrino and acoustic mechanisms to D <~ 2kpc. Furthermore, we show that we can differentiate between models for rotating accretion-induced collapse of massive white dwarfs and models of rotating iron core collapse with high reliability out to several kpc.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure

Unbiased Characterization of Anopheles Mosquito Blood Meals by Targeted High-Throughput Sequencing

Understanding mosquito host choice is important for assessing vector competence or identifying disease reservoirs. Unfortunately, the availability of an unbiased method for comprehensively evaluating the composition of insect blood meals is very limited, as most current molecular assays only test for the presence of a few pre-selected species. These approaches also have limited ability to identify the presence of multiple mammalian hosts in a single blood meal. Here, we describe a novel high-throughput sequencing method that enables analysis of 96 mosquitoes simultaneously and provides a comprehensive and quantitative perspective on the composition of each blood meal. We validated in silico that universal primers targeting the mammalian mitochondrial 16S ribosomal RNA genes (16S rRNA) should amplify more than 95% of the mammalian 16S rRNA sequences present in the NCBI nucleotide database. We applied this method to 442 female Anopheles punctulatus s. l. mosquitoes collected in Papua New Guinea (PNG). While human (52.9%), dog (15.8%) and pig (29.2%) were the most common hosts identified in our study, we also detected DNA from mice, one marsupial species and two bat species. Our analyses also revealed that 16.3% of the mosquitoes fed on more than one host. Analysis of the human mitochondrial hypervariable region I in 102 human blood meals showed that 5 (4.9%) of the mosquitoes unambiguously fed on more than one person. Overall, analysis of PNG mosquitoes illustrates the potential of this approach to identify unsuspected hosts and characterize mixed blood meals, and shows how this approach can be adapted to evaluate inter-individual variations among human blood meals. Furthermore, this approach can be applied to any disease-transmitting arthropod and can be easily customized to investigate non-mammalian host sources

Encouraging Insurers to Regulate: The Role (If Any) for Tort Law

Insurance companies are financially responsible for a substantial portion of the losses associated with risky activities in the economy. The more insurers can lower the risks posed by their insureds, the more competitively they can price their policies, and the more customers they can attract. Thus, competition forces insurers to be private regulators of risk. To that end, insurers deploy a range of techniques to encourage their insureds to reduce the risks of their insured activities, from charging experience-rated premiums to discounting premium rates for insureds who make specific behavioral changes designed to reduce risk. Somewhat paradoxically, however, tort law discourages insurers from engaging in the direct regulation of their insureds’ behavior. Under long-standing tort principles, if an insurer “undertakes” to provide serious risk-reduction services to its insured, the insurer can be found to have a duty of reasonable care in performing such services and, should that duty be breached, held liable for any harms caused to third parties. This application of tort principles to insurance companies could be contributing to the moral hazard problem often associated with insurance—the tendency of insurance to cause risk to increase rather than decrease. This Article explores this problem and analyzes a number of ways to encourage insurers to regulate—from insurer-specific Good Samaritan statutes (which we might call “carrots”) to the creation of an affirmative duty on the part of insurers to regulate through the expansion of tort liability (which would definitely be a “stick”). What combination of carrots and sticks produces the optimal insurer incentives to regulate their insureds’ behavior? That is the question this Article addresses

Solving the Judgment-Proof Problem

A tortfeasor who cannot fully pay for the harms that it causes is said to be judgment proof. Commentators have long recognized that the existence of judgment-proof tortfeasors seriously undermines the deterrence and insurance goals of tort law. The deterrence goal is undermined because, irrespective of the liability rule, judgment-proof tortfeasors will not fully internalize the costs of the accidents they cause. The insurance goal will be undermined to the extent that the judgment-proof tortfeasor will not be able to compensate fully its victims and that first-party insurance markets do not provide an adequate response. Liability insurance can ameliorate these so-called judgment-proof problems in two ways: First, if liability insurance is experience rated or feature rated, the presence of such insurance can induce tortfeasors to take appropriate steps to prevent accidents.5 Second, the presence of liability insurance increases the amount of assets available to compensate plaintiffs. This is because when a judgment-proof tortfeasor has purchased liability insurance, not only the tortfeasor\u27s assets but also the assets of the insurance company can potentially be used to compensate tort victims. However, because virtually all liability insurance policies contain policy limits and because only some liability insurance policyholders have sufficient assets to cover tort judgments that exceed those policy limits, some liability insureds will nevertheless be judgment-proof

If Taxpayers Can\u27t Be Fooled, Maybe Congress Can: A Public Choice Perspective on the Tax Transition Debate

In When Rules Change: An Economic and Political Analysis of Transition Relief and Retroactivity , Shaviro takes the various strands of the existing literature on retroactivity and weaves them together, applying his unique combination of legal expertise, political pragmatism, and theoretical sophistication in public finance economics as well as political science. The result is a subtle, balanced, and scholarly treatise on transition relief and retroactivity that should serve as the starting point for all future research in the field. In its stated objectives, the book is admirably ambitious. This Review will, in a broad sense, follow Shaviro\u27s characterization of the book\u27s objectives. Part I will summarize the existing economic framework for analyzing legal transitions and retroactivity issues (with major emphasis on tax transitions). Although Shaviro makes numerous interesting contributions to this framework, this Review will examine only the two most significant of these. That will be done in Part II. Then, Part III will focus on Shaviro\u27s principal innovation: his introduction of a thoroughgoing public choice perspective and CTB ideology to the tax transitions debate