Francisco Perales’s research while affiliated with University of Queensland and other places

Recent climate disasters serve as a reminder of the growing—yet overlooked—risk of climate-driven displacement in the Global North. This paper contributes to a nascent literature on disaster-induced mobility in high-income countries by extending the evidence to a new context: Australia. Applying propensity score matching to panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we conduct the first causal assessment of the impact of home damage caused by extreme weather events on residential mobility in Australia. Our findings suggest that from 2009 to 2022, an annual average of 1.6% of Australians aged 15 + (or ~ 308,000 people a year) experienced home damage caused by floods, cyclones or bushfires. Such damage increases the probability of changing address within 1 year by 56%, displacing an annual average of 22,261 Australians. Cumulatively, this amounts to ~ 312,000 people displaced by climate-induced home damage between 2009 and 2022. Importantly, this type of climate-induced mobility is not evenly spread across the population. Contrary to findings from the Global South, we find no evidence of “entrapment effects”, except for uninsured homeowners. Instead, our results indicate that over 80% of climate-displaced Australians come from the bottom two income quartiles, with the poorest 3% accounting for 14% of the displaced population. The most disadvantaged Australians thus face a double vulnerability: they are both more likely to sustain home damage from extreme weather events and more likely to be displaced. These findings bear important implications for adaptation strategies and policy responses to natural disasters.

Workplace sexual harassment represents a critical risk to contemporary organizations, with evidence indicating that its prevalence is increasing. Research has consistently demonstrated that workplace-sexual-harassment victimization exerts negative impacts on employees’ health and wellbeing. However, no empirical studies have examined how these impacts vary by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) status. In this study, we leverage a unique survey dataset (2022 Australian Workplace Equality Index Employee Survey, n = 44,943) and random-intercept, multilevel regression models to estimate the relationships between workplace-sexual-harassment victimization and employee wellbeing. Expanding on earlier studies, we consider how these relationships vary between LGBTQ+ and other employees, across domains of employee wellbeing, and with the timing of sexual harassment. Our results reveal large, negative, and statistically significant impacts of sexual harassment on employee wellbeing. The impacts are comparatively larger for LGBTQ+ employees and recent harassment experiences, and manifest across all domains of employee wellbeing. These findings underscore the urgent need for holistic programs to combat workplace sexual harassment, and the importance of connecting these programs with diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Recent climate disasters serve as a reminder of the growing-yet overlooked-risk of climate-induced displacement in the Global North. This paper contributes to a nascent literature on climate migration in high-income countries by extending the evidence to a new context: Australia. Applying propensity score matching to panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we conduct the first causal assessment of the direct short-term impact of extreme weather events on internal migration in Australia. Our findings suggest that, from 2009 to 2022, an annual average of 1.6% of Australians aged 15+ (or ~308,000 people a year) experienced housing damage caused by floods, cyclones or bushfire. Such damage increases the probability of changing address within one year by 7.3%, displacing an annual average of 22,261 Australians. Cumulatively, this amounts to ~312,000 people displaced by climate-induced housing damage between 2009 and 2022. Importantly, this type of climate-induced migration is not evenly spread across the population. Contrary to findings from the Global South, we find no evidence of "entrapment effects", except for uninsured homeowners. Instead, our results indicate that over 80% of climate-displaced Australians come from the bottom two income quartiles, with the poorest 3% accounting for 14% of the displaced population. The most disadvantaged Australians thus face a double vulnerability: they are both more likely to sustain housing damage from extreme weather events, and more likely to be displaced. These findings bear important implications for adaptation strategies and policy responses to natural disasters.

Growing empirical evidence shows that the decision to migrate is influenced by parents’ international migration experiences, with the second generation being more likely to migrate than individuals with no migration background. However, the factors underpinning this intergenerational transmission of migration behaviour remain poorly understood. This study extends existing evidence in two main ways. First, it assesses the relative contribution of two transmission pathways: family migration history and lived childhood migration experiences. Second, it considers both the probability of migrating as an adult and the direction of migration (onward versus return migration). We apply survival analysis to retrospective survey data for baby boomers who were born in or migrated to any of 15 European countries during childhood and track their first international migration in adulthood. We find that family migration history facilitates adult life migration, particularly when both parents migrated. Living in a foreign country as a child is more conducive to adult life migration than family migration history alone. For individuals born in the survey country, childhood migration experiences enable the acquisition of both general and location-specific migration capital, whereas for members of the 1.5 generation, these experiences mainly lead to location-specific migration capital. Building on these initial findings, we refine the concept of migration capital as a set of general and location-specific attitudes, skills, and resources that accumulate within and across generations through family migration history and lived migration experiences, and that facilitate future migration by altering individuals’ perceptions of migration’s monetary and non-monetary costs and benefits. Further empirical testing is required to generalise this concept.

Insecure housing-particularly for low-income groups-constitutes a critical and enduring social problem. While Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) initiatives show promise as a solution to mitigate this issue, research assessing their impact remains limited. This paper makes three contributions to the empirical PSH literature: it develops a novel framework to measure the success of PSH tenancy outcomes; it expands the evidence-base to consider the role of tenancy issues and provider-initiated tenancy-sustainment supports; and it provides new evidence on a single-site PSH initiative in Queensland (Australia)-Brisbane Common Ground (BCG). We use 10 years' worth of administrative data on all 417 tenancies-both concluded and ongoing-taking place since the onset of BCG in July 2012 and up to November 2022. Our main analyses combine descriptive statistics, event-history analyses, and logistic regression models. Results reveal significant heterogeneity in the probability of experiencing positive PSH tenancies across socio-demographic groups, the intervening role of tenancy issues, and the partially protective role of provider tenancy-sustainment initiatives. The results, however, vary depending on the lens through which PSH tenancy outcomes are viewed. These findings stress the need for targeted PSH strategies that better cater for the complex needs of specific subgroups of tenants.

Assertive outreach is becoming an increasingly salient feature of policy responses to homelessness-and particularly rough sleeping-with the aim of supporting people to access secure housing. Despite its demonstrated successes, existing research points to structural challenges practitioners face in navigating complex and fragmented service systems to provide people sleeping rough with a continuum of care. This study examines an Australian organisation's efforts to collaboratively and systematically overcome these challenges by bringing together government, community and service practitioners from multiple sectors in their delivery of an assertive outreach programme. Using an ethnographic research design, this article draws on observations of outreach practices and service provider administrative quantitative data, as well as qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with assertive outreach service providers. Our findings demonstrate that through flexible and collaborative social work practices, practitioners were able to see people sleeping rough, share information across services and support people into a range of housing, health and other forms of services. Critically, however, structural barriers such as a lack of affordable and social housing prevented assertive outreach from ending people's homelessness. We foreground the critical implications of these findings for social work.

Résumé S'il est de plus en plus établi que les études supérieures améliorent les perspectives professionnelles, l'inégalité de leur rendement suscite des inquiétudes croissantes. Les auteurs utilisent un nouveau jeu de données administratives couplées couvrant l'ensemble des étudiants diplômés d'une université australienne entre 2005 et 2011 pour comparer, sur dix ans, la trajectoire professionnelle de publics défavorisés à l'aune de différents critères (position socio‐économique, origine ethnique, lieu de résidence, migration, incapacité) à celle de leurs homologues favorisés. Ils constatent une grande hétérogénéité des trajectoires en termes de revenu et de perception de prestations sociales. Ces résultats ont d'importantes implications pour les politiques visant à améliorer l'équité sociale sur le marché du travail.

Resumen Pese a la evidencia de que la educación universitaria mejora las perspectivas laborales, preocupan sus desiguales rendimientos. Sobre los datos administrativos de toda la población de graduados en universidades australianas en el periodo 2005‐2011, se estudian las trayectorias laborales de los individuos procedentes de entornos sociales desfavorecidos (por estatus socioeconómico, migración, discapacidad, origen étnico y zona de residencia) en comparación con los más favorecidos, a lo largo de diez años. La heterogeneidad de la evolución de los ingresos laborales y la percepción de prestaciones por desempleo entre los graduados de distintos grupos es notable. Esto tiene hondas implicaciones para las políticas de equidad social.