John Mangan

An Analysis of Occupational Outcomes for Indigenous and Asian Employees in Australia

This paper examines occupational performance in Australia across three racial groups in Australia: Indigenous Australians; Asian people, defined as all those whose language spoken at home was either Chinese, Vietnamese or other forms of a South-east or East Asian language; and white people, defined as the residual category. The paper has as its starting point, observed differences in occupational attainment among the three groups in Australia and sets out to account for these observed differences on the basis of both race and non-racial attributes such as, age, education and area of residence.

Workers Without Traditional Employment: An International Study of Non-Standard Work

Part 1 The incidence of non-standard employment: non-standard employment - incidence and definitional problems. Part 2 Explaining non-standard employment: the determinants of the rise in non-standard employment empirical evidence on the determinants of non-standard employment. Part 3 The economic and social implications of non-standard employment: job stability and job satisfaction implications for labour market organizations and economic performance work and family issues summary and conclusions.

Minimum wages, training wages and youth employment

High rates of youth unemployment, worldwide, have led governments to advocate a range of policies designed to increase job offers to young workers. For example, the Australian Government is currently introducing a system of “training wages” which will see effective youth wages set well below adult award wages for a designated training period. This policy is designed to simultaneously increase the human capital of young workers as well as help to overcome the initial barriers to entry into the labour market. However, youth‐specific wages have been criticized on the basis of age discrimination and on equity grounds. Also, some US data question the employment‐boosting potential of reduced minimum youth wages. In this paper recent international findings on the relationship between youth wages and employment are presented and compared with empirical tests of the relationship using labour market data for Australia as a whole as well as the State of Queensland. The results are used to examine the likely impact of the introduction of the training wage on the youth labour market in Australia and to provide further generalizations on the wider issue of employment and youth‐specific wages.

Casual Employment in Australia: A Further Analysis

Casual employment is steadily increasing its share of total employment in Australia. This paper analyses some of the factors that have led to this situation by extending the work of Simpson, Dawkins and Madden (1997). The results, while confirming some of their research and clarifying the role of union membership in limiting the spread of casual employment, also show that the determinants of casual employment in Australia are sensitive to the period of estimation and the form of model used. Copyright 1999 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University of South Australia

Measuring competitive balance in sports using generalized entropy with an application to English premier league football

A central issue in the economics of sport is the degree of competitive balance in sporting contests. The importance attached to competitive balance is predicated on the belief that it is uncertainty about the outcomes of sporting contests that attracts spectators and sponsors. In a perfectly balanced competition, each team would have an equal chance of winning each match and, therefore, of winning the championship or the league. By contrast, the absence of competitive balance would mean that the results of sporting contests would become predictable and attendance at sporting contests would suffer. The general theme that underpins the issue of competitive balance is that of inequality. This article proposes a general measure of competitive balance based on the Generalized Entropy (GE) approach to measuring inequality and shows how this might be interpreted in terms of the leagues welfare. The measures are applied to results from 2006 to 2007 season of the English Premier League (EPL).

Surviving apprenticeship training: A duration analysis of apprenticeship contracts in Australia

Fifty percent of youth entrants to apprenticeships in Australia fail to complete their course producing costs to, employers, the trainees themselves and society in general. This study uses data from the Direct Entry Level Training Administration for a duration analysis of this high attrition rate. We find those most likely to survive apprenticeship training will be males who have completed high school prior to training, work with a single employer, undertake train within the Government system and avoid occupations such as food trades and hairdressing.

Spatial Inequality in the Australian Youth Labour Market: The Role of Neighbourhood Composition

Andrews D., Green C. and Mangan J. (2004) Spatial inequality in the Australian youth labour market: the role of neighbourhood composition, Reg. Studies 38, 15–25. Australia has experienced a polarization of income and labour market outcomes over the past 20 years (Gregory and Hunter, 1995; Harding, 1996). This has taken an increasingly spatial dimension (Hunter, 1995a, 1995b), giving rise to concerns that the spatial pooling of disadvantage may hamper the labour market outcomes of youth growing up in poorer residential areas. This paper explores the role that the differential neighbourhood ‘quality’ of an individual’s residential area at age 16 has on their labour market outcomes at age 18 and age 21. Evidence is found that youth who live in poorer quality neighbourhoods face an increased likelihood of being unemployed at both the age of 18 and 21, even after controlling for personal and family characteristics.

Mistaking style for substance: investor exuberance in the 2008 Indian Premier League auction.

The formation of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2008 sought to unlock the commercial potential that the popularity of T20 cricket offered by modeling itself on football’s English Premier League. The IPL acted as a holding company, securing the participation of players through a guaranteed base price and then selling these players to the various IPL franchises though an auction system which determined their final payment. There were thus two components to a player’s “value”: the base price determined by the IPL and the final price paid at the IPL auction by the winning bid for that player. The basic assumption made in this article is that the base price for a player is founded for the most part on the publicly available information about him. However, auction under IPL 2008 was characterized with large and unexpected base–final price differences. This raises the possibility that the bidding process was driven by the “irrational exuberance” created within the newly formed franchises. This article measures the scale of such exuberance and evaluates, on the basis of their IPL record, whether players were good or bad buys.

Cancellation of indigenous Australians from the apprenticeship training contract

The vocational education and training (VET) sector is a major pathway to post‐school education for indigenous students, yet questions are being raised about the capacity of the VET system to provide successful outcomes for the indigenous apprentices and trainees it attracts. Within a system plagued by high cancellation rates in general, indigenous apprentices appear to do particularly badly. This paper combines data from an administrative database on apprenticeship with income data from the 2001 Census of Population and Housing to provide an analysis of attrition rates for apprenticeship training contracts in Queensland, asking: Are cancellation rates for indigenous students significantly higher than those for non‐indigenous students, and, if so, what factors are responsible for this?

Home is where the hurt is: an econometric analysis of injuries caused by spousal assault

Using data on injuries presenting at the emergency departments of participating hospitals in the Australian state of Queensland we examine the nature of injuries resulting from spousal assault and compare them to injuries from nonspousal assault and accidental injuries. We ask: who are the persons most vulnerable to spousal assault?, Are spousal assault injuries more (or less) severe than injuries from nonspousal assault and accidental injuries? Do the recorded figures for assault injuries on women understate the true number of assault injuries, and if so, by how much? ‘But for my bonny Kate, she must with me. I will be master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels’ (Taming of the Shrew).