Academic literature on the topic 'Crime New South Wales Econometric models'

Purpose Developing policies to curb public alcohol consumption is a priority for governments. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), local governments have introduced alcohol-free zones (AFZs) and alcohol-prohibited areas (APAs) to prohibit the public consumption of alcohol and reduce crime stemming from intoxication. Previous studies, however, argue that these policies are driven by stakeholder desire rather than alcohol-related crime and may result in increased criminal justice contact for vulnerable populations. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the number of AFZs and APAs in NSW and examine the extent to which these policies are connected to the frequency of alcohol-related crime. Design/methodology/approach Examining the 152 local government areas (LGAs) of NSW, the authors analysed whether the implementation of AFZs and APAs were linked to the frequency of liquor offences and assaults using group-based trajectory models. Findings The authors found that AFZs and APAs were often not advertised nor inconsistently implemented both across and within jurisdictions. Group-based trajectory models indicated that AFZs were more common in low liquor offence LGAs than high liquor offences LGAs, but were more frequently implemented in high assault LGAs compared to low assault LGAs. APAs were more common in the lowest crime LGAs compared to those LGAs that experienced higher levels of recorded crime. Originality/value These analyses demonstrate how widespread AFZs and APAs have become and provides evidence that the implementation of is only tenuously linked to the frequency of crime.

In the following pages of Pacific Journalism Review, the journal is publishing transcripts of Center for Investigative Journalism director Robert Rosenthal’s keynote address at the ‘Back to the Source’ investigative journalism conference in Sydney in September 2010; conference sessions in which Sue Spencer, Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie talk about their work on the Securency story; and Linton Besser and Dylan Welch of the Sydney Morning Herald describe their investigations of the New South Wales Crime Commission. Many other sessions featured at the conference; but these two transcripts give a strong sense of some of the new possibilities for investigative journalism, and of how investigative journalists practise their craft.

Purpose – Understanding and simulating construction activities is a vital issue from a macro-perspective, since construction is an important contributor in economic development. Although the construction labor productivity frontier has attracted much research effort, the temporal and regional characteristics have not yet been explored. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the long-run equilibrium and dynamics within construction development under a conditional frontier context. Design/methodology/approach – Analogous to the simplified production function, this research adopts the conditional frontier theory to investigate the convergence of construction labor productivity across regions and over time. Error correction models are implemented to identify the long-run equilibrium and dynamics of construction labor productivity against three types of convergence hypotheses, while a panel regression method is used to capture the regional heterogeneity. The developed models are applied to investigate and simulate the construction labor productivity in the Australian states and territories. Findings – The results suggest that construction labor productivity in Australia should converge to stable frontiers in a long-run perspective. The dynamics of the productivity are mainly caused by the technology utilization efficiency levels of the local construction industry, while the influences of changes in technology level and capital depending appear limited. Five regional clusters of the Australian construction labor productivity are suggested by the simulation results, including New South Wales; Australian Capital Territory; Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia; South Australia; and Tasmania and Victoria. Originality/value – Three types of frontier of construction labor productivity is proposed. An econometric approach is developed to identify the convergence frontier of construction labor productivity across regions over time. The specified model can provides accurate predictions of the construction labor productivity.

External events are commonly known as interventions that often affect times series of counts. This research introduces a class of transfer function models that include four different types of interventions on integer-valued time series: abrupt start and abrupt decay (additive outlier), abrupt start and gradual decay (transient shift), abrupt start and permanent effect (level shift) and gradual start and permanent effect. We propose integer-valued transfer function models incorporating a generalized Poisson, log-linear generalized Poisson or negative binomial to estimate and detect these four types of interventions in a time series of counts. Utilizing Bayesian methods, which are adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to obtain the estimation, we further employ deviance information criterion (DIC), posterior odd ratios and mean squared standardized residual for model comparisons. As an illustration, this study evaluates the effectiveness of our methods through a simulation study and application to crime data in Albury City, New South Wales (NSW) Australia. Simulation results show that the MCMC procedure is reasonably effective. The empirical outcome also reveals that the proposed models are able to successfully detect the locations and type of interventions.