Digital revolution and fake news

HE digital revolution and its instantaneous short-term benefits have been celebrated and sold to mankind by peddlers of technology as a blessing in our march towards greater efficiency and productivity. This, it is argued, will fulfil our increasing lust for greater material rewards. What technopreneurs do not tell us is the negative effects of digital revolution. The negative effects include a black market in computerised extortion, the rise in depression and the spread of fake news. The spread of fake news is insidious because it can wreak havoc in our social and political lives. It is said that we are living in a post-truth era that is characterised by the eclipse of objective facts. Put in another away, in the post-truth era, objective facts will be less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. What is appalling about the rise of fake news is that we do not have the intellectual tools to differentiate truth from lies

"Effects of Information Technology and Aging Work Force on Labor Demand and Technological Progress in Japanese Industries: 1980-1998"

The purpose of this paper is two-folds. First, we examine the direction and the magnitude of substitutability or complementarity between information- and communication-related capital stock and various labor inputs to know about differential impacts of information and com-munication technology on labor demand. In this way, we can obtain information about what segments of workers information and communication technology can effectively substu-tute for. Second, we estimate contribution of information- and communication-related capital stock and various labor inputs on the value-added growth of the Japanese economy in the recent turbulent era (1980s and 1990s) and explore factors determining technological progress. In particular, we investigate whether rapid accumulation of information-related capital stock has a positive effect on technological progress, examining IT externality. We also discern the effect of compositional changes in labor inputs on technological progress, examining the inflexibility issue and IT-induced technological obsolescence issue. Three remarkable facts emerge from our result with respect to substitutability/complementarity issues. First, IT capital stocks are shown to be significant substitutes for young workers with a low education level, whereas old workers with a low education level are consistently quasi-fixed in all industries under investigation. Second, IT capital stocks have complemen-tary relationship with workers with a high education level in many industries. Third, workers with a high education level and those with a low education level are substitutes. These all suggest that IT investment and human capital accumulation are of utmost importance to overcome possible shortage (in relative terms) of young workers with a low education level caused by rapidly aging population. As for IT externality, we find at first positive correlation between IT stocks and techno-logical progress in manufacturing, suggesting a strong externality effect of IT capital stocks. In the first glance it is very promising, since this suggests that this IT externality can be used for boosting productivity growth. However, the correlation is not robust. First, if non-manufacturing industries are included, the correlation vanishes. Second, if "Electrical Machinery" is excluded from the sample of manufacturing, the correlation also vanishes. Thus, we fail to discern clear-cut evidence for IT externality. Thus, the proposition that IT "revolution"can pop up productivity growth and can counter the pressure of aging population is not supported by our data, although investment in IT-producing industries is surely an important driving force for economic growth through substitution effects. As for the effect of labor force composition on the rate of technological progress, the results do not support that the "inflexible old worker" hypothesis of productivity slowdown. There is no correlation between the rate of technological progress and the ratio of old workers with low education in the total labor inputs. However, the results suggest that information technology development in the 1990s has a negative impact on the past strength of the Japanese economy: productivity increase through high-education workers' learning by doing. In manufacturing industries where Japan has been strong, the rate of technological progress in the 1980s has positive (though weak) correlation with "maturing" high-education labor force. That is, the ratio of old well-educated workers in the total labor inputs has a positive (though weak) effect on technological progress. This suggests that the increased average skill among well-educated workers due to longer experience has a positive effect to improve productivity. However, the relationship changes significantly in the 1990s, and we have rather negative relationship. The nature of technological progress apparently changed adversely.

Employer-sponsored health insurance and worker productivity

Health insurance for the working population of the United States is largely provided through employers primarily because of favorable income tax treatments and employment laws that encourage employers, large or small, to provide health insurance to their employees. In fact, a recent survey shows that employer-sponsored insurance covers over 50% of the non-elderly population of the United States, 57% of firms offered health benefits to employees, and 63% of workers accepted the coverage. This dissertation addresses several interesting questions raised by this situation. First, why do some firms offer health insurance to their employees whereas others do not? Second, what determines the number of health insurance plans offered among employers who do offer health insurance? Third, how do employers’ decisions concerning how many health insurance plans to offer influence the take-up decisions by employees and, therefore, variations in the extent and quality of health insurance coverage across industries and occupations? To provide at least a partial answer to these questions, this dissertation hypothesizes that employer-sponsored health insurance may affect worker productivity and, as a result, the different types of health insurance policies offered by employers and taken up by their workers. It then empirically investigates whether and how it does so. The first part of the dissertation addresses this issue from a theoretical perspective by investigating how employers decide the types and costs of the health insurance plans they offer, and their workers decisions whether to take up those plans. Following the existing literature, I examine these issues assuming that each worker’s demand for health insurance (and health status) is unobserved by the firm, that health insurance plans are priced competitively, and that workers do not move between employers. The contribution of the theory presented here is to add into this environment the assumption that a worker’s productivity is altered by the provision of employer-sponsored health insurance. The dissertation also explores certain variants of this theoretical model to investigate workers’ take-up decisions by modifying the framework so that workers can choose to remain uninsured. The second part of the dissertation tests whether and how employer-sponsored health insurance affects worker productivity in the real world by conducting an empirical analysis using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). It does so by using a variable measuring health-related absenteeism due to sickness as a proxy for productivity and investigating the relationship between this productivity proxy variable and a variable indicating whether a worker is insured through his or her employer. To purge this relationship of the endogeneity effects that may result from selection, the dissertation utilizes employment-related spousal variables as instruments for the potentially endogenous employer-sponsored health insurance variable. The resulting (negative) estimates suggest that employer-health insurance may enhance worker productivity by reducing health-related absenteeism. The hypothesis that health insurance improves worker productivity helps explain why firms are willing to offer health insurance to their employees and bear part of the premium costs. The dissertation makes several contributions in the field of health economics. First, the dissertation brings about the novel idea that health insurance may affect productivity. Second, it theoretically examines the take-up decisions of workers by allowing them to remain uninsured. Third, the dissertation studies the firms’ optimal decisions and equilibrium conditions when workers require reservation wages. Fourth, it finds a statistically significant empirical relationship between a proxy for worker productivity (days missed for health reasons) and employer-sponsored health insurance

Happiness and the productivity of software engineers

Software companies and startups often follow the idea of flourishing happiness among developers. Perks, playground rooms, free breakfast, remote office options, sports facilities near the companies, company retreats, you name it. The rationale is that happy developers should be more productive and also retained. But is it the case that happy software engineers are more productive? Moreover, are perks the way to go to make developers happy? Are developers happy at all? What are the consequences of unhappiness among software engineers? These questions are important to ask both from the perspective of productivity and from the perspective of sustainable software development and well-being in the workplace. Managers, team leaders, as well as team members should be interested in these concerns. This chapter provides an overview of our studies on the happiness of software developers. You will learn why it is important to make software developers happy, how happy they really are, what makes them unhappy, and what is expected regarding happiness and productivity while developing software.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, edited by Caitlin Sadowski and Thomas Zimmermann. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1707.0043

The employer's perspective on retirement

In this chapter we discuss the literature with respect to the role of employers in retirement processes of older workers and provide suggestions for future research. In the first part of this chapter we will review existing theoretical insights regarding the employers’ actions and attitudes toward older workers and retirement. In the next section we will discuss empirical findings with regard to age related stereotypes in the workplace and age norms with respect to retirement and present some results form an international comparative employer study. We conclude with a section on the management of retirement processes, focussing on the exit and hiring of older workers.

Are happiness and productivity lower among university students with newly-divorced parents? : an experimental approach

We live in a high-divorce age. Parents worry about the possibility of negative effects upon their children. This paper tests whether recent parental-divorce has deleterious consequences for grown children. Under controlled conditions, it measures students’ happiness with life, and their productivity in a standardized laboratory task. No negative effects from divorce can be detected. If anything, happiness and productivity are greater, particularly among males, if they have experienced parental divorce. Using longitudinal BHPS data -- to control for fixed effects -- we cross-check this result on happiness. Again, the evidence suggests that young people’s mental well-being improves after parental divorce

Impact of demographic factors on employee engagement:a study with reference to vasan publications private limited,chennai

Employee plays a vital role in each and every organization; the interest of employee will help to achieve the organization’s objectives. Successful employee engagement strategy creates a community at a work place and not just a work force. When the employees are effectively and positively engaged with their organization, they form an emotional connection with the company. This effects their attitude towards both their colleagues and the company’s client and improves customer satisfaction and services levels. Employee Engagement Surveys have gained importance among the companies and in this work the researcher has studied the impact of Demographic Variables on Employee Engagement The researcher adopted descriptive research and the data is collected from the employee through convenience sampling method with the help of personally administrated questionnaire containing close ended questions and the sample size is 50. This data was analyzed and classified with the help of statistical tools and the findings and suggestion are extracted from the same

Noisy Business Cycles

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and—potentially—shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the response of macroeconomic outcomes to such shocks; (ii) induce a negative shortrun response of employment to productivity shocks; (iii) imply that productivity shocks explain only a small fraction of high-frequency fluctuations; (iv) contribute to significant noise in the business cycle; (v) formalize a certain type of demand shocks within an RBC economy; and (vi) generate cyclical variation in observed Solow residuals and labor wedges. Importantly, none of these properties requires significant uncertainty about the underlying fundamentals: they rest on the heterogeneity of information and the strength of trade linkages in the economy, not the level of uncertainty. Finally, none of these properties are symptoms of inefficiency: apart from undoing monopoly distortions or providing the agents with more information, no policy intervention can improve upon the equilibrium allocations

How Do You Feel, Developer? An Explanatory Theory of the Impact of Affects on Programming Performance

Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. In this paper, we report on an interpretive study aimed at broadening our understanding of the psychology of programming in terms of the experience of affects while programming, and the impact of affects on programming performance. We conducted a qualitative interpretive study based on: face-to-face open-ended interviews, in-field observations, and e-mail exchanges. This enabled us to construct a novel explanatory theory of the impact of affects on development performance. The theory is explicated using an established taxonomy framework. The proposed theory builds upon the concepts of events, affects, attractors, focus, goals, and performance. Theoretical and practical implications are given.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. Postprin

Are Cost Conscious Community Colleges Sacrificing Quality?

Compared to their four-year public counterparts, community colleges have been more successful in holding down the costs of educating students but current research, albeit limited, suggests that this may have come at the expense of quality or at least outcomes. This essay addresses the questions surrounding this issue, including the behavior of costs at public two-year colleges and what the research says about quality and outcomes issues. It is based on my study of community colleges over the past twenty-five years