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This study seeks to determine an appropriate form of yield analysis as a means of improving the supply of low cost rental housing within Australia.

Rental returns are quantified on a disaggregated basis based on the amalgamation of three major government property databases.

Much of the information on returns in low cost rental housing is based on erroneous assumptions. More accurate reporting of returns would put in place the appropriate risk premium for investment in low cost rental housing.

The study adds value by allowing policy makers to better understand the nature of returns required to increase the level of investment in the low cost end of the private rental market.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of this legislative reform in the state of South Australia (SA) through an examination of the relationship between listed or advertised price and transaction prices before and after the changes in regulation. Between 2000 and 2008, legislative changes took place throughout Australia to make real-estate transactions more transparent and to deal with misleading conduct by real-estate agents. The practice of “charm” or “bait” pricing was targeted. This denotes the under-quoting of estimated selling prices in real-estate sale advertisements which can be considered deceptive or even fraudulent.

The study area is Adelaide, the state capital of SA and includes analysis of first and last advertised prices and eventual selling price for > 120,000 residential sales transactions over a nine-year period between 2003 and 2011. The analysis to test these hypotheses included, first, a descriptive evaluation of the percentage price difference over time and a spatial breakdown of mean percentage price difference before and after legislation. Second, for each hypothesis, the change was tested by measuring the variance of the percentage change, with significance established through the Levene and Brown–Forsythe tests, rather than by the mean percentage change.

The results, both descriptive and statistical, support the effectiveness of the reform in legislation.

The study has application in terms of agents as social gatekeepers and confirms the role of regulation to ensure market values are achieved and consumers not disadvantaged. With friction in the market, imperfect information and the possible behavioural responses of land agents, there may be incomplete market correction of underpricing strategies. This paper confirms the effectiveness of one such market intervention.

Some half a million dwellings are purchased in Australia every year. Annually, in the state of SA, some 53,000 dwellings are financed to be purchased or built. These levels of purchase reflect national home ownership rates of about 69 per cent, with some 33 per cent of Australians owning their houses outright and a growing number, some 36 per cent, owners with a mortgage. Australian households also move house relatively frequently. In 2008, 43 per cent of Australians reported moving in the previous 5 years, 15 per cent had moved 3 or more times. The most common reasons for moving were twofold, either to buy a house or to buy a bigger house. These levels of purchase, home ownership and mobility underpin the importance and viability of some 10,000 real-estate services businesses in Australia; a sector which, up to 2,000, was largely self-regulated.

This paper is one of the first in Australia to effectively quantify the success of legislative reform on residential agency behaviour.

In most Western, industrialised countries the relationship between work and welfare is close, but asymmetric. The effect of employment policy on welfare recipients or welfare systems is usually a minor consideration when determining the former; whereas the effect which welfare policies are expected to have on work patterns is often the controlling consideration when welfare rates and conditions are decided. In fact, one of the most influential factors in the establishment of social welfare policies is the presumed effect of such policies on incentives to work. Almost all social welfare programmes throughout the world have written into them a “wage stop” which guarantees that recipients of grants—sometimes even of social insurance payments—will not receive as much income from such programmes as they could receive from working. So pervasive and deep is this fear of a work disincentive that even those who cannot work, such as the aged, the handicapped, and children; and those whom public policy says should not be required to work, like the mothers of infants, are usually limited as to the amount which they can receive from welfare payments, regardless of need, to somewhat less than the amount which they would receive if they were able to work. In Israel, for example, social welfare grants are fixed at 40% of the average wage; in France, old age pensions will rise by 1975 from even lower rates to 25% of the annual wage at age 60, and 50% at age 65 [International Labour Review, 1972], whereas unemployment insurance benefit, which was 35–40% until 1974, rose to only 70% of the average annual wage [Oechslin, 1972]. In the United States, “… In 1968, the average weekly unemployment insurance benefit was about one‐third of the weekly wage in employment that was covered under the programme” [Handler, 1972]. By thus making it impossible for many persons to acquire through welfare what they theoretically could (but actually could not) acquire from work, the fear of work disincentives, operating through the wage stop, is one of the factors guaranteeing the existence and continuation of poverty.

The phenomenon of creativity spans research topics across Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Interest in, and research on, creativity has grown over the past several decades. With this heightened attention comes the question of how best to conceptualize and measure creativity. This question is addressed by reviewing the conceptualizations and measures used in the psychological study of creativity. From this review, we build a framework by which to analyze papers from the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research. Based upon this analysis, we provide recommendations and best practices for future research. Of particular importance, we recommend the use of convergent problem-solving tasks in combination with ratings of novelty and usefulness reported separately. Such measures allow one to distinguish between instances of effective-creativity (when an idea is both novel and useful) and instances of quasi-creativity (when an idea is novel but lacks usefulness). The importance of the framework to research and analysis beyond the experimental paradigm is discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Board Neutrality Rule and the primacy afforded to shareholders during takeovers is justified under common law and policy.

The paper provides a detailed assessment of the role play by the board neutrality rule and whether this is supported by takeover law and Company law. A review of case law and statutes is provided. The paper is largely analytical.

The paper finds little justification for the continued imposition of the Board Neutrality Rule.

The paper adds to the growing body of research literature which has analysed the role played by the Board Neutrality Rule during takeovers.

This chapter considers the mobilities of families subject to child protection involvement at the threshold of the birth of a new baby. The author presents data arising from an ethnographic study of child protection social work with unborn babies. This study aimed to draw near to social work practice within the Scottish context through mobile research methods and included non-participant observations of a range of child protection meetings with expectant families. Research interviews were sought with expectant mothers and fathers, social workers and the chair persons of Pre-birth Child Protection Case Conferences. Case conferences are formal administrative meetings designed to consider the risks to children, including unborn children. This chapter focusses on the experiences of expectant parents of navigating the child protection involvement with their as yet unborn infant. The strategies that parents adopted to steer a course through the multiple possibilities in relation to the future care of their infant are explored here. Three major strategies: resistance, defeatism and holding on are considered. These emerged as means by which expectant parents responded to social work involvement and which enabled their continued forwards motion towards an uncertain future.

The last two years have witnessed what may justly be described as a revolutionary change in the packaging and marketing of goods, of which pre‐packed food constitutes a substantial part, but as far as public reaction goes, it has largely been a silent witness. There has been none of the outcry such as accompanied metrication, sufficient to call a halt to the process, and especially to the introduction of the decimal currency, of which most shoppers are convinced they were misled, “conned”. Every effort to make the changeover as smooth as possible was made; included was the setting up within the Department of Trade of a National Metrological Co‐ordinating Unit charged with co‐ordinating the work of 91 local weights and measures authorities in Great Britain in enforcing the new law, the Weights and Measures Act, 1979. This Act replaced the net or minimum system of the old law, the traditional system, re‐enacted in the Weights and Measures Act, 1963 with the average system, implementing EEC Directives and bringing weights and measures into line with Member‐states of the European Community.