This thesis is comprised of a series of published papers relating to the evaluation of active assistance measures for the unemployed in Australia. It offers both applied evaluations of active assistance measures as well as critical assessment of the evaluation approaches that have dominated the literature and policy formation in Australia. "Active" assistance for the unemployed is distinguished from "passive" assistance, such as income support.The motivation behind the work lies in the fact that a very large amount of public expenditure is directed to active assistance for the unemployed. Over $2 billion dollars was spent on labour market programs at the height of the Working Nation package in each of 1995-96 and 1996-97, and $1.5 billion was allocated to "labour market assistance to jobseekers and industry" in the most recent (2001-02) Commonwealth budget. Despite this considerable past and ongoing expenditure, the evaluation effort in Australia has been far short of international best practice. As a consequence, there is no convincing empirical evidence as to how effectively these public resources are being used, or of the relative merits of various options in the design of active interventions for the unemployed.Ultimately, the goal of the research is to improve supply-side policies designed to address unemployment. As stated, it aims to do this through original empirical evaluations of programs and through critical assessment of existing evaluations and institutional arrangements.

This dissertation aims to investigate alternative explanations for the adjustment of low-income inner-city minorities to residential locations. Particularly, this study searches for an answer to find the reason why low-income inner-city minorities do not move to residential locations with more job opportunities (suburbs). Much of the basis for the analysis in this dissertation derives from the irreversible investment theory under the assumption that moving can be considered as an irreversible investment. First, this study formulates a search model in which individuals simultaneously search for jobs and residential locations in two places: suburb and inner-city. Second, by employing The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Geocode files, this study attempts to address how social capital plays a role in households’ moving decisions under the irreversibility assumption. This study presents evidence that the social capital has a negative causal effect on moving decision, that is, the high levels of social capital reduce the probability of moving.

Sambandet mellan personlighet och arbetssökande beteende har mestadels undersökts bland studenter tidigare. Denna studie undersökte om känslomässig instabilitet påverkade sättet att söka arbete hos 123 arbetssökande icke-studenter mellan 20-65 år. Enkäten som användes bestod av Personality Questionnaire (Bäccman & Carlstedt, 2010), som mäter personligheten utifrån femfaktorsmodellen, samt Job Search Behavior (Blau, 1994), som mäter förberedande och aktiva arbetssökande beteenden. Det fanns ett samband mellan känslomässig instabilitet och båda arbetssökande beteenden. Känslomässig instabilitet kunde dock inte ensam predicera vilket arbetssökande beteende individer väljer, men tillsammans med ålder kunde känslomässig instabilitet predicera förberedande arbetssökande, och ålder kunde även ensamt predicera förberedande arbetssökande. Ålder kan vara en bättre prediktor än känslomässig instabilitet för arbetssökande beteende i en svensk population. / The relationship between personality and job search behavior has mostly been investigated among students before. This study investigated if neuroticism affected job search behaviors for 123 unemployed non-students between 20-65 years. The survey used consisted of Personality Questionnaire (Bäccman & Carlstedt, 2010), measuring personality based on the five-factor model, and Job Search Behavior (Blau, 1994), measuring preparatory and active job search behaviors. There was a relationship between neuroticism and both job search behaviors. Neuroticism alone could, however, not predict which job search behavior individuals choose, but along with age neuroticism could predict preparatory job search, and age could even solely predict preparatory job search. Age may be a better predictor than neuroticism for job search behavior in a Swedish population.

ABSTRACT Title: A Study of Impact of Leader-Member Exchange and Organizational Justice on Employee¡¦s Behavior- A case study of officers of correction institution Affiliation: Institute of Human Resource Management of National Sun Yat-sen University Student: Chia Ching Chang Advisor: Jin Feng Uen Jail management in Taiwan has changed into correctional education from punishment-oriented system with the development of human rights and humanistic education since last century. This year (2010), Chairperson of Department of Correction, Xian-Zhange Wu, conveyed his vision of ¡§building and shaping prison culture to open gate of new hope and set examples of correction work¡¨ having been active in cultivating correction officers of all levels in an attempt to ¡§manage prison with a human face¡¨ on the basis of respect and care. Correction offices, in addition to monitoring, are expected show love and respect because they are in the front line of managing inmates. In such a unique working environment, they are expected to not only fulfill social expectation but re-educate the inmates. Their increased responsibility and hostile but caring role are worthy of investigation. Different leadership styles give rise to various team and workplace climates which result in distinct team performances. With growing responsibility, maintaining positive relationship with colleagues encourages officers to carry out duties more faithfully and improves organizational citizenship behavior as well. Besides, inmates¡¦ emotion, the priority of correction institution, will be relatively stable. This virtuous cycle, based on love and the vision of humanistic prison, will be realized. This study investigated the impact of leader-member exchange theory on organizational justice and employees¡¦ behavior. Subjects were drawn from 12 correction institutions. Pre-test was conducted in 6 institutions to examine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. 1281 copies were delivered and 951 retrieved with valid 716 copies. The valid response rate was 75%. We used SPSS to test proposed hypotheses. Results are as follow: leader-member exchange is positive to organizational justice and to citizenship behavior; organizational justice in correction institution has partial influence on citizenship behavior; organizational justice has only intervening effect on leader-member exchange and on citizenship behavior. Recommendations and management implication of the study hopefully will benefit the intended institution. Keyword: Leader-member Exchange Theory, Organizational Justice, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Job Search Behavior

Work-life issues have been concerned by employees and employers from decades ago. The family structure has been transformed for the work style and most practices have been changed with human resource policy. However, the organizational climate of work and life is not clear and few of organizations implement comprehensive evaluation for the work-life culture. This research proceeds the cross-level analysis by using the hierarchical linear model which provides more precise outcomes. Besides, supervisor support has been recognized one of social supportive and informal organizational supportive resources, included by the work-life culture. Because of the unclear conception of informal organizational support, this research talks about the relationship of supportive supervisor behavior and organizational work-life policy. Furthermore, supervisor support comes up with employees¡¦ subjective well-being. Many scholars recognize employees who have supervisor support experience can reduce work-family conflict and turnover rate. Reasonably, job search behavior is the priority of voluntary quitting and job choosing, which helps to understand the process of employees¡¦ mind changing. To sum up, this research emphasizes on the influence among supportive supervisor behavior to work-life integration policy, subjective well-being and job search behavior. There are three dimensions for individuals, departments and organizations, combing employees¡¦ subjective well-being and objective job research behavior, excluding individual segmentation preference and segmentation support of workplace so as to strengthen the casual relationship and impersonal evaluation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of corporate reputation on work attitudes and behaviors. We used the benchmark company surveyed result of CommonWealth Magazine and developed a qestionnaire to survey those benchmark companies¡¦ employees. Finally, we obtained an effective sample of 50 companies with 1222 employees. And the response rate was 83% for companies and 68% for employees. The result of this study showed that external corporate reputation has positively influential effect on employee corporate reputation, employee corporate reputation has positively influential effect on work attitudes and behaviors, external corporate reputation has partially positively influential effect on work attitudes and behaviors, and employee corporate reputation will partially mediate the positively influential effect of external corporate reputation on work attitudes and behaviors. Based on above findings, the practical implications, research limitation and suggestions for future study are addressed.

Although many people experiences dissatisfaction with their jobs at some time or another, not all of them quit their jobs because of it. Why do some employees simply continue to work in an unsatisfying environment? In this study, it is hypothesized that part of the reason is based on the individual's personality, specifically their scores on positive and negative affectivity. Results showed that neither NA nor PA moderated the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intentions/job search, contrary to previous literature. This study suggests that the moderation effect of personality on this relationship, either does not exist or is more complicated than formerly thought.

<p>Social capital has so far been suggested to enhance the career outcomes of disadvantaged immigrants by compensating for their lack of human capital. Contrastingly, by examining labor market outcomes by immigrant groups, my dissertation argues that social capital can actually serve as a source of disadvantages for immigrants in the labor market, especially for a socially disadvantaged immigrant group like Mexican immigrants. Specifically, the dissertation proposes three kinds of social capital processes through which social status and network processes interplay to disadvantage disproportionately a low-status immigrant group in the job attainment process: access, activation, and return deficit of social capital. Using data from the 2005 U.S. Social Capital-USA survey, I examine these three kinds of social capital deficit across three ethnic immigrant groups: Mexican, non-Mexican Hispanic, and non-Hispanic immigrants. The first chapter explores the inequality of social capital across immigrant groups. The result shows that among the three immigrant groups, Mexican immigrants are the only immigrant group who have smaller, less diverse networks than the native-born. This access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants is driven primarily by their relative lack of human capital compared with other immigrant groups. The second chapter investigates whether ethnic enclaves constrain the access to social capital of enclave immigrants. The result shows that the constraining effect of ethnic enclaves on the social capital building of enclave immigrants is found only for the ethnic enclave of Mexican immigrants. This is because the ethnic enclaves of disadvantaged immigrants facilitate social connections to other coethnic enclave immigrants with similar socioeconomic traits, while constraining them from extending their networks beyond the enclaves. The access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants will eventually aggravate their job prospects because they cannot mobilize social capital for their job finding as much as other immigrant groups do. The third chapter examines the activation and mobilization of social capital in the job attainment process across immigrant groups. The result shows that Mexican immigrants activate and reap the benefit from mobilizing social capital for their job finding in ways that are different from those of the native-born as well as the high-status immigrant group. Due to their access deficit of social capital and negative stereotypes about them, Mexican immigrants are obliged to use a less rewarding job search method (i.e., using information passed from job contacts) rather than use a more rewarding job search method (i.e., using invitations from job contacts). Although Mexican immigrants benefit to some degrees from using information passed from job contacts in getting low-tier occupations, their heavy reliance on such a job search method can also prevent them from attaining middle- or top-tier occupations. By illuminating these serial processes of social capital in the job attainment for disadvantaged immigrants, my dissertation, therefore, sheds light on a new role of social capital as a source of immigrant disadvantages in the labor market.</p> / Dissertation

Diss. (sammanfattning)--Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2008. / Härtill 3 uppsatser.

Unemployment in Austria has been considerably low in the past decades compared to other European countries. Nevertheless, recent increases in the past five years started a controversial discussion about the generous unemployment insurance system in place. The current government, therefore, argues to change the insurance system similar to the German HARTZ IV reform, although the effects on unemployment have proven to be ambiguous in Germany. I introduce a discrete time life-cycle model with endogenous job-search effort to inquire the potential effects of such a reform on long- and short-term unemployment, as well as individuals' job-search incentives. Individuals are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labour income possibilities and are subject to exogenous layoffs throughout their life. The model suggests that the proposed reform would reduce long-term unemployment substantially, however, to the cost of a larger amount of short-term unemployment spells and decreased overall welfare. Job-search effort over the whole life-cycle appears to increase, with the largest differences at the end of the life-cycle.