Dark Corners in a Bright Economy; The Lack of Jobs for Unskilled Men

This paper discusses the large reductions in full-time employment among unskilled Australian males that began in the 1970's and continued over the next three to four decades. Over this period, each recession led to large falls in the male full-time employment-population ratio and during each economic recovery the employment ratio failed to move back to previous levels. Unemployment fell during each output recovery, not in response to employment gains, but in response to large scale withdrawals from the labour market into the welfare system. The loss of unskilled jobs for men has been associated with falling marriage rates and increasing use of the welfare system by single women. The paper concludes by briefly assessing some of the impacts of the new resource boom on these long run labour market and welfare trends and discusses the potential for different labour market outcomes emerging across mineral and non-mineral states.Employment, Unskilled jobs

Impact of Interupted Education on Earnings: The Educational Cost of the Chinese Cultural revolution

Impact of school interruptions on earnings through lower subsequent educational attainment and lower quality of education is investigated using the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a natural experiment. During the Cultural Revolution, most schools in China stopped normal operation for 3 to 4 years, universities stopped normal student recruitment for an even longer period. Such large scale school interruptions reduced the opportunity of the cohort to obtain university degrees. We find that individuals who did not obtain a university degree becasue of the Cultural revolution on average lost 46 per cent of their potential earnings. In addition most of the cohort experienced missed or interrupted schooling, at a given level of education and we show that this reduced earnings of degree holders of the Cultural Revolution cohort by 7.3 per cent on average. The findings in this paper also indicate that the quality of schooling affected earnings of individuals in a non-linear way, that is, only missed schooling at junior and senior high level reduced subsequent earnings and it only reduced earnings of those with degrees.

Then and now: Reflections on two Australian mining booms

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by export price increases (trading gains) rather than export volume increases. Terms of trade changes - through their direct trading gain effect and indirect real GDP effect, primarily through increased employment levels - have increased Australian living standards. The increase, relative to the US, is about 25 per cent; an increase which probably places Australian living standards well above those of the US

The Two-Step Australian Immigration Policy and its Impact on Immigrant Employment Outcomes

Three decades ago most immigrants to Australia with work entitlements came as permanent settlers. Today the annual allocation of temporary visas, with work entitlements, outnumbers permanent settler visas by a ratio of three to one. The new environment, with so many temporary visa holders, has led to a two-step immigration policy whereby an increasing proportion of immigrants come first as a temporary immigrant, to work or study, and then seek to move to permanent status. Around one half of permanent visas are allocated on-shore to those who hold temporary visas with work rights. The labour market implications of this new two-step system are substantial. Immigrants from non-English speaking countries (NES), are affected most. In their early years in Australia, they have substantially reduced full-time employment and substantially increased part-time employment, usually while attending an education institution. Three years after arrival one third of NES immigrants are now employed part-time which, rather than unemployment, is becoming their principal pathway to full-time labour market integration. Surprisingly, little has changed for immigrants from English speaking countries (ES)

The Development of the Eastern Africa Collection at Syracuse University

With the inauguration of an African studies program in 1962, Syracuse University began the development of a unique collection of records relating to the eastern side of Africa. The most important part of the collection, the core, is related to Kenya, but there are also valuable records on the other countries of eastern Africa, nine in all, extending from Ethiopia to South Africa. Most of the items in this collection are on microfilm—an extraordinary holding of nearly four thousand reels of official and private records—but there is also much of value in supplementary books, periodicals, and documents in their original form. The acquisition of this collection required an unusual degree of cooperation not only between the faculty and administration at Syracuse, but also between the University, on the one hand, and the government ministers, archival and university personnel, and communal leaders in Africa on the other. Coordination, also, was essential with certain organizations in the United States such as the African Studies Association, the Center for Research Libraries, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Tuning the Performance of a Computational Persistent Homology Package

In recent years, persistent homology has become an attractive method for data analysis. It captures topological features, such as connected components, holes, and voids from point cloud data and summarizes the way in which these features appear and disappear in a filtration sequence. In this project, we focus on improving the performanceof Eirene, a computational package for persistent homology. Eirene is a 5000-line open-source software library implemented in the dynamic programming language Julia. We use the Julia profiling tools to identify performance bottlenecks and develop novel methods to manage them, including the parallelization of some time-consuming functions on multicore/manycore hardware. Empirical results show that performance can be greatly improved

A COMPARISON OF HYPOTHETICAL PHONE AND MAIL CONTINGENT VALUATION RESPONSES FOR GREEN PRICING ELECTRICITY PROGRAMS

To date, much of the policy and research debate on contingent valuation mode effects has relied on experiences drawn from other research disciplines. This study provides the first contingent valuation phone-mail comparison that meets current standards for response rates, draws from a general population, is relevant to the valuation of general environmental goods, and allows comparisons with actual sign-ups. Consistent with previous research in other disciplines, social desirability bias is found in responses to subjective questions --thus leading to more environmentally favorable responses on the phone. However, this effect does not carry over to hypothetical participation decisions. Hypothetical bias is found in both modes. Yet, application of calibration methods using debriefing questions provided nearly identical values across modes. As such, neither mode appears to dominate from the perspective of providing more valid estimates of actual participation decisions. The selection of survey mode must be based on other criteria.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Freeform Extrusion of High Solids Loading Ceramic Slurries, Part II: Extrusion Process Control

Part I of this paper provided a detailed description of a novel fabrication machine for high solids loading ceramic slurry extrusion and presented an empirical model of the ceramic extrusion process, with ram velocity as the input and extrusion force as the output. A constant force is desirable in freeform extrusion processes as it correlates with a constant material deposition rate and, thus, good part quality. The experimental results in Part I demonstrated that a constant ram velocity will produce a transient extrusion force. In some instances the extrusion force increased until ram motor skipping occurred. Further, process disturbances, such as air bubble release and nozzle clogging that cause sudden changes in extrusion force, were often present. In this paper a feedback controller for the ceramic extrusion process is designed and experimentally implemented. The controller intelligently adjusts the ram motor velocity to maintain a constant extrusion force. Since there is tremendous variability in the extrusion process characteristics, an on-off controller is utilized in this paper. Comparisons are made between parts fabricated with and without the feedback control. It is demonstrated that the use of the feedback control reduces the effect of process disturbances (i.e., air bubble release and nozzle clogging) and dramatically improves part quality.Mechanical Engineerin