BackgroundHigh unemployment is a hallmark of psychotic illness. Individual placement and support (IPS) may be effective at assisting the vocational recoveries of young people with first-episode psychosis (FEP).AimsTo examine the effectiveness of IPS at assisting young people with FEP to gain employment (Australian and Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12608000094370).MethodYoung people with FEP (n = 146) who were interested in vocational recovery were randomised using computer-generated random permuted blocks on a 1:1 ratio to: (a) 6 months of IPS in addition to treatment as usual (TAU) or (b) TAU alone. Assessments were conducted at baseline, 6 months (end of intervention), 12 months and 18 months post-baseline by research assistants who were masked to the treatment allocations.ResultsAt the end of the intervention the IPS group had a significantly higher rate of having been employed (71.2%) than the TAU group (48.0%), odds ratio 3.40 (95% CI 1.17–9.91, z = 2.25, P = 0.025). However, this difference was not seen at 12- and 18-month follow-up points. There was no difference at any time point on educational outcomes.ConclusionsThis is the largest trial to our knowledge on the effectiveness of IPS in FEP. The IPS group achieved a very high employment rate during the 6 months of the intervention. However, the advantage of IPS was not maintained in the long term. This seems to be related more to an unusually high rate of employment being achieved in the control group rather than a gross reduction in employment among the IPS group.Declaration of interestNone.

We propose a framework for measuring social exclusion in Australia and discuss a number of issues that need to be resolved in order to arrive at valid and useful indicators or measures. To do this we first provide a general overview of international developments in the measurement of poverty and social disadvantage, examine the meaning of the concept of social exclusion and summarise the various approaches taken by international and Australian studies to measuring social exclusion and identifying the socially excluded. We then outline our proposed framework for the measurement of social exclusion in Australia, identifying and discussing some of the issues that arise in moving from this framework to actual measures, including discussing the limitations imposed by the data currently available in Australia.

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of worklessness and apply this index to data from 5 countries over 25 years. Built around a comparison of the actual household workless rate with that which would occur if employment were randomly distributed over household occupants, we show that in all the countries we examine, there has been a growing disparity between the individual and household based workless measures. The polarisation count can be decomposed to identify which household groups are exposed to workless concentrations and can also be used to test which individual characteristics account for any excess worklessness among these household groups. We show that the incidence and magnitude of polarisation varies widely across countries, but that in all countries polarisation has increased. For each country most of the discrepancies between the individual and household workless counts stem from within-household factors, rather than from changing household composition.

We investigate transitions between unemployment, low-paid employment and higher-paid employment using household panel data for the period 2001 to 2011. Dynamic panel data methods are used to estimate the effects of labour force status on subsequent labour force status. A distinctive feature of our study is the investigation of heterogeneity in the effects of unemployment and low-paid employment on future employment prospects. We find that there is state dependence in both unemployment and low-paid employment and clear evidence of a low-pay no-pay cycle for both men and women. Significant differences in effects across different subgroups of the population are, however, found. Typically, the young and the better educated face less severe penalties from unemployment or low-paid employment, and, for women, the cycle between low pay and no pay varies across subgroups. Moreover, in the case of men who have completed secondary schooling but have no further qualifications, low-paid employment actually decreases the chances of entering higher-paid employment by more than unemployment does. This is not the case for women, however, who clearly have a higher likelihood of entering higher-paid employment from low-paid employment than from unemployment, regardless of their age, education level or other characteristics.

This paper examines the simultaneous determinants of employment and wage rates for people of working age in New Zealand. The determinants are as anticipated and similar to results in other countries. In addition to the effects of the usual variables (such as, education, age, family composition), it is found that unemployment affects the probability of employment negatively, but has no effect on wage rates, living with one's parents decreases the employment probability of singles but increases it for sole parents, and the change in the age of eligibility for the New Zealand Superannuation affects the employment decision, indicating that individuals reacted to incentives to participate at an older age.