Spatial inequality in the Australian youth labour market: The role of neighbourhood composition

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.

An analysis of clinical characteristics in genetically linked migraine-affected pedigrees

Migraine is a common complex disorder characterized by severe recurrent headache and usually accompanied by nausea and vomiting. Previous studies in our laboratory have utilized three large multigenerational Australian pedigrees affected with migraine to indicate that the disease is genetically heterogeneous, with linkage results implicating genomic susceptibility regions on both chromosomes 19p and Xq. The present study explores the possibility of a correlation between genetic and clinical heterogeneity in these affected pedigrees. Specifically, the clinical characteristics of migraine including subtype, age of onset, frequency, duration, and disease symptoms were compared between the migraine pedigrees, and gender differences were also assessed. Our exploratory analyses revealed no significant differences in any of the clinical characteristics tested between the chromosome 19-linked family and the two X-linked families. Also, we did not detect any differences in male vs. female clinical features for these pedigrees. In conclusion, migraine is considered to be a clinically and genetically heterogeneous disorder; however, our study provided no conclusive evidence that variation in genomic susceptibility region is related to heterogeneity at the clinical level in these migraine-affected pedigrees.

Human KLF17 is a new member of the Sp/KLF family of transcription factors

The Sp/KLF transcription factors perform a variety of biological functions, but are related in that they bind GC-box and CACCC-box sequences in DNA via a highly conserved DNA-binding domain. A database homology search, using the zinc finger DNA-binding domain characteristic of the family, has identified human KLF17 as a new family member that is most closely related to KLFs 1-8 and 12. KLF17 appears to be the human orthologue of the previously reported mouse gene, zinc finger protein 393 (Zfp393), although it has diverged significantly. The DNA-binding domain is the most conserved region, suggesting that both the murine and the human forms recognize the same binding sites in DNA and may retain similar functions. We show that human KLF17 can bind G/C-rich sites via its zinc fingers and is able to activate transcription from CACCC-box elements. This is the first report of the DNA-binding characteristics and transactivation activity of human KLF17, which, together with the homology it displays to other KLF proteins, put it in the Sp/KLF family. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The effect of non-standard employment on work-family balance

Across the last four decades, the structure of the Australian labour market has changed profoundly as non-standard forms of employment have become more prevalent. According to many researchers, the growth of non-standard work has been driven by employee preferences, particularly among married women, for greater flexibility to balance paid work with domestic responsibilities and other non-work related pursuits. In contrast, other researchers argue that the increasing prevalence of non-standard employment reflects employer demands for greater staffing flexibility. From this perspective, non-standard forms of employment are considered to have a negative effect on work-family balance. This paper explores whether non-standard employment is associated with improved or poorer work-to-family conflict and tests whether experiences vary by gender. It concentrates on three common forms of non-standard employment: part-time employment, casual and fixed-term work contracts and flexible scheduling practices (such as evening work, weekend work and irregular rostering). Analysis is based on 2299 employed parents from the first wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics on Australia (HILDA) project. Results show that few scheduling measures are significant determinants of work-family balance. However, part-time employment is associated with reduced work-to-family strain for both men and women, even after controlling for various other employment and household related characteristics. Casual employment, in contrast, incurs the cost of poorer work-family balance for men. Surprisingly, HILDA data show that overall men experience greater work-to-family strain than women.