The Effects of Labor Market Regulations on Employment Decisions by Firms: Empirical Evidence for Argentina

There are few Latin American countries that produced such a remarkable turnaround in policies and outcomes as Argentina did in the 1990s. The large number of reforms yielded surprisingly strong growth and the near-disappearance of inflation. The change of `economic paradigm` led to behavioral changes that reflected themselves in a number of other areas. Perhaps the most striking change took place in the labor market, where job creation and destruction reigned in earnest. There, where reforms were moderate, high open unemployment was the result. This paper looks at the potential effect regulations might have on labor demand dynamics. In particular, we try to ascertain how movements in labor costs influence firms` decisions regarding job creation. The paper first presents descriptive evidence on who benefits from regulations and how much they cost. The evidence is based on PHS Microdata and identifies the effects on individuals` labor market outcomes stemming from varying regulations. The paper then turns to labor demand estimation. We exploit a panel data set that comprises some 1,300 manufacturing firms for the period 1990-1996. The panel provides information on employment and hours worked, as well as overtime hours, wages and physical production. We exploit the hours worked/jobs relation to shed some light on labor market dynamics. It is found that regulations do have a sizable and significant negative effect on employment decisions. In particular, it appears that severance payment regulations do hurt employment decisions. It is also found that firms rationally substitute workers for a more intensive use of hours.

A Review of the Role and Impact of Export Processing Zones in World Trade : the Case of Mexico

While the number of export processing zones has risen to about 850 in 2000, their success in expanding employment and trade is mixed. The aim of this paper is to make a review of the role and the impact of EPZ in world trade and its likely impact on host countries' economies, especially in terms of foreign exchange earnings potential, FDI, technology transfer, and employment effects on the local and national economies. To this end we will be looking at Mexico where export processing zones are very developed. Mexico seems an appropriate case study to assess to which extent the predictions of economic theory are realised both because of the abundance and quality of available data and because of its proximity to the US, which makes it a very good example of the international division of labour. We will analyse how the parameters mentioned above (employment, foreign exchange earnings potential, FDI and technology) have evolved over the last 10-15 years and how much of the change can be traced back to the maquila industry. The main source of data is INEGI, the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica Geografica e Informatica of the Mexican Government.export processing zones; foreign exchange earnings potential; Mexico; technology spillovers

A Selectivity based approach to Continuous Pattern Detection in Streaming Graphs

Cyber security is one of the most significant technical challenges in current times. Detecting adversarial activities, prevention of theft of intellectual properties and customer data is a high priority for corporations and government agencies around the world. Cyber defenders need to analyze massive-scale, high-resolution network flows to identify, categorize, and mitigate attacks involving networks spanning institutional and national boundaries. Many of the cyber attacks can be described as subgraph patterns, with prominent examples being insider infiltrations (path queries), denial of service (parallel paths) and malicious spreads (tree queries). This motivates us to explore subgraph matching on streaming graphs in a continuous setting. The novelty of our work lies in using the subgraph distributional statistics collected from the streaming graph to determine the query processing strategy. We introduce a "Lazy Search" algorithm where the search strategy is decided on a vertex-to-vertex basis depending on the likelihood of a match in the vertex neighborhood. We also propose a metric named "Relative Selectivity" that is used to select between different query processing strategies. Our experiments performed on real online news, network traffic stream and a synthetic social network benchmark demonstrate 10-100x speedups over selectivity agnostic approaches.Comment: in 18th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) (2015

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Liberating labour: The New Zealand employment contracts act

Between 1984 and 1991, New Zealand converted its economic system from the most heavily regulated to the least regulated in OECD. The public sector was restructured to separate core administrative functions from government-owned production activities. The latter were corporatised, and many privatised. Product markets were deregulated and opened to international competition. Virtually all producer subsidies were abolished. Foreign trade was liberalised. Financial and capital markets were liberalised and foreign investment and immigration were made welcome. Labour markets were freed up, and workers were given the right to associate freely. In the process, a formerly inwardlooking, slow-moving economy with rising unemployment was turned into a flexible, globally competitive, high-growth economy with price stability, above-average job creation and small, effective government. New Zealand had long been known internationally for its system of centralised wage fixing and arbitration. Since 1991, however, it has become equally known for the new Employment Contracts Act (ECA), which was the capstone of the comprehensive economic and social reform programme. The ECA converted a centralist, corporatist industrial relations system into a decentralised 'market order. Freely negotiated labour contracts are now the basis for responsive, diverse labour markets. The effects of the Act can only be understood as an integral part of all-round liberalisation and New Zealand's reinvention of government. Previously antagonistic industrial relations have given way to cooperation between employers and workers, flexible adjustment to competitive conditions and an enhanced competitiveness of New Zealand workplaces and firms in a rapidly changing, internationally open economy. The new workplace relationship has led to profound attitude changes which have been inspired by the discipline of open, competitive product markets and the withdrawal of several labour-supply disincentives in the form of public-welfare supports. The main effect of the labour reforms has been to assist in making the supply-side of the New Zealand economy fairly price elastic. This has been underpinned by a price-level target for independent monetary policy and by fiscal downsizing, privatisation and public debt reduction. Employers and most employees have welcomed the freedoms under the new contracts system. In many sectors, productivity has risen steeply, reflecting more rational work practices. Managers are now able to effectively manage the human resources that firms hire. Real wages have risen, but slowly, reflecting productivity gains. Union membership and the number of union officials have fallen, as many workers now use bargaining agents to negotiate employment contracts. The frequency of strikes and lockouts has fallen considerably. The ECA and the other reforms have created a Kiwi job-creation machine, which has increased aggregate employment by over 10 percent during the long upswing of 1991- 95. It has nearly halved the overall unemployment rate within less than two years - in contrast to earlier upturns in the New Zealand cycle and the pattern in Australia. As labour shortages are emerging in the present cyclical upswing, many long-term unemployed, the young and Maori are being drawn back into gainful employment. Labour market deregulation has also increased the market premia for skills and reduced transaction costs in operating about markets. Most observers predict a period of sustained, inflation-free growth and further drops in unemployment (March 1995: 6.6%) as New Zealand - despite a strengthening currency - is now seen as an internationally highly competitive exporter and an attractive location to internationally mobile capital and enterprise.