Minimum Wages and Poverty

The principal justification for minimum wage legislation resides in improving the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been confined to simulation exercises employing rather restrictive assumptions that guarantee the conclusion that an increase in the minimum wage reduces poverty. In contrast, we adopt a more flexible "reduced-form" approach that links increases in both federal and state minima to contemporaneous changes in poverty rates. For the period 1983-96, we find indication of a poverty-reducing effect of minimum wages among older junior-high dropouts and among teenagers. --

The demise of a model? The state of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany.

This article investigates collective bargaining trends in the German private sector since 2000. Using data from the IAB Establishment Panel and the German Establishment History Panel, it provides both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on these developments. It confirms that the hemorrhaging of sectoral bargaining, first observed in the 1980s and 1990s, is ongoing. Furthermore, works councils are also in decline, so that the dual system also displays erosion. For their part, any increases in collective bargaining at firm level have been minimal in recent years, while the behavior of newly-founded and closing establishments does not seem to lie at the root of a burgeoning collective bargaining free sector. Although there are few obvious signs of an organic reversal of the process, some revitalization of the bargaining system from above is implied by the labor policies of the new coalition government

Minimum Wage Increases Under Straightened Circumstances

Do apparently large minimum wage increases in an environment of recession produce clearer evidence of disemployment effects than is typically observed in the new minimum wage literature? This paper augments the sparse literature on the most recent increases in the U.S. minimum wage, using three different data sets and the two main estimation strategies for handling geographically-disparate trends. The evidence is generally unsupportive of negative employment effects, still less of a 'recessionary multiplier.' Minimum wage workers seem to be concentrated in sectors of the economy for which the labor demand response to wage mandates is minimal.minimum wages, disemployment, earnings, low-wage sectors, geographically-disparate employment trends, recession

Examining NDUFAB1 Expression in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) accounts for around 4% of all cancers in the USA. HNSCC includes cancers of the oral cavity, oropharynx, nasopharynx, hypopharynx, and larynx. Reprogramming of mitochondrial metabolism has been known to promote oncogenesis. NDUFAB1, a nuclear encoded subunit of respiratory complex I (RCI) in the inner mitochondrial membrane, is abundantly expressed at the mRNA level in HNSCC patients. Based on this finding, we hypothesize that NDUFAB1 protein expression is high in HNSCC and that NDUFAB1 expression predicts a poor prognosis in HNSCC patients. We determined NDUFAB1 expression in HNSCC using immunohistochemistry and pathology guided digital imaging and used this data, along with patients’ cancer stage, tumor grade, age, sex, and survival to determine HNSCC outcome. The results showed a statistically significant increase in NDUFAB1 protein expression in cancer tissues compared to normal controls. There was also a statistically significant correlation between NDUFAB1 expression in normal tissues and progressive clinical stage and tumor grade, along with patients’ age. However, there was a statistically insignificant association between NDUFAB1 expression and the patients’ sex and survival, as well as between clinical stages and tumor grades

The Impact of Line Misidentification on Cosmological Constraints from Euclid and other Spectroscopic Galaxy Surveys

We perform forecasts for how baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from future spectroscopic emission line galaxy (ELG) surveys such as Euclid are degraded in the presence of spectral line misidentification. Using analytic calculations verified with mock galaxy catalogs from log-normal simulations we find that constraints are degraded in two ways, even when the interloper power spectrum is modeled correctly in the likelihood. Firstly, there is a loss of signal-to-noise ratio for the power spectrum of the target galaxies, which propagates to all cosmological constraints and increases with contamination fraction, $f_c$. Secondly, degeneracies can open up between $f_c$ and cosmological parameters. In our calculations this typically increases BAO scale uncertainties at the 10-20% level when marginalizing over parameters determining the broadband power spectrum shape. External constraints on $f_c$, or parameters determining the shape of the power spectrum, for example from cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, can remove this effect. There is a near-perfect degeneracy between $f_c$ and the power spectrum amplitude for low $f_c$ values, where $f_c$ is not well determined from the contaminated sample alone. This has the potential to strongly degrade RSD constraints. The degeneracy can be broken with an external constraint on $f_c$, for example from cross-correlation with a separate galaxy sample containing the misidentified line, or deeper sub-surveys.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, updated to match version accepted by ApJ (extra paragraph added at the end of Section 4.3, minor text edits

Attitudes, beliefs, and changing trends of cannabis usage among college students

Cannabis, specifically, marijuana has a complicated history in the United States where it started off as an ingredient in medicines, went to become highly taboo and illegal, and now is slowly becoming legalized medically and recreationally in the United States. There are legal barriers in preventing research on marijuana making it difficult for all its benefits and detriments to be known and proven. Marijuana is most used among college students and people within the age range of 18-25 making them a priority population. Students (n 74) on Eastern Michigan University\u27s (EMU) campus were randomly selected to participate in taking a 22-question descriptive survey to gather information on their knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of marijuana and its use. Without the ability to conduct research on marijuana, there are many challenges that will arise affecting people\u27s health and safety, especially with its growing legalization in the U.S

Characteristics of Award-Winning Children’s Books About Agriculture: An Analysis of Content, and The Perspectives of Authors, Illustrators, and Publishers

The purpose of this two-article qualitative study was to characterize children\u27s literature about agriculture and to describe the perceptions of authors and illustrators who are responsible for writing and designing these successful publications. This will result in the ability of organizations like Feeding Minds Press to provide writers, illustrators, and publishers with effective strategies and techniques to improve the accuracy and overall quality of children’s literature about agriculture. Few parameters exist for authors of children’s books about agriculture (Biser, 2007). These parameters are necessary to ensure the quality and accuracy of these educational efforts (Serafini, 2012). Though Feeding Minds Press has an established set of guidelines for authors, this publisher and others like it need empirical evidence on which to base these parameters and set future expectations for authors, illustrators, and publishers of books promoting agricultural literacy (R. Henningfield, personal communication, October 2021). Grounded in Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, this study comprised of both content analysis and semi-structured interview route. The content analysis was comprised of 14 American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture award-winning children’s books about agriculture which were analyzed for predetermined literary features. The top three characteristics were pictorial realism, fantastical context, and critical anthropomorphism. Each of these characteristics was present in at least six titles with the number of references in a single title ranging from one to 12. Characteristics were identified in both the illustrations and storyline of the titles. During the semi-structured interviews, researchers interviewed the authors, illustrators, and publishers of the 14 selected books to learn more about their background knowledge about agriculture, their motivations to create publications about agriculture. The transcripts from these interviews were hand-coded using NVivo12 software to identify themes and similarities between interviews with the participants, with several themes emerging. Key themes included similar backgrounds, motivations, and creative processes. Most participants started their careers in the education or creative writing space. The passions that motivated these creators to produce content for children about agriculture included their fulfillment from lifelong learning. In the creative process, many creators leaned on writing groups and mentors for support. Each aspect of the research objective was used to form open-ended questions for interview participants to describe the experiences of authors and illustrators as they research, write, publish, and illustrate children’s books about agriculture