Gesamtbericht zur Evaluation desallgemeinen gesetzlichen Mindestlohnsnach § 23 Mindestlohngesetz

Das Gesetz zur Regelung eines allgemeinen Mindestlohns (MiLoG) ist zum 1. Januar 2015 in Kraft getreten und hat für Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer in Deutschland eine bindende Lohnuntergrenze eingeführt. Mittlerweile liegen zahlreiche Studien zu den Auswirkungen des gesetzlichen Mindestlohns vor, die für die vorliegende Gesamtevaluation nach §23 MiLoG systematisch ausgewertet wurden. Die Mindestlohnforschung umfasst neben quantitativen Kausalanalysen auch deskriptive undqualitative Untersuchungen und nutzt dabei verschiedene Datengrundlagen. Nach derzeitigem Forschungsstand hat der Mindestlohn seit seiner Einführung zum Schutz der Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer vor Niedrigstlöhnen beigetragen, war dabei weitgehend beschäftigungsneutral und hatte kaum Auswirkungen auf den Wettbewerb zwischen Unternehmen. Reduzierte Arbeitszeiten deuten allerdings darauf hin, dass Betriebebzw. Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmerinfolge der Mindestlohneinführung einen alternativen Anpassungskanal zur Steuerung ihres Arbeitsvolumens genutzt haben. Die identifizierten Effekte resultieren im Wesentlichen aus der Einführung, nicht aus der Erhöhung des Mindestlohns. Kaum messbar ist bislang das Ausmaß der Nichteinhaltung: Der gesetzliche Mindestlohn wird in einer unbekannten Zahl an Betrieben mit teilweise rechtswidrigen Praktiken umgangen. Hier, ebenso wie mit Blick auf die mittel- und langfristigen Auswirkungen des Mindestlohns, besteht weiterer Forschungsbedarf.On January 1, 2015, a law governing a general minimum wage (MiLoG) introduced a mandatory lower wage limit for employees in Germany. In the meantime,there have been numerous studies on the effects of the statutory minimum wage that were systematically evaluated for the current full-scale evaluation according to Section 23 of the MiLoG. In addition to quantitative causal analysis research on the minimum wage covers descriptive as well as qualitative studies and uses different data sets. According to currentstate ofresearch, the minimum wage has contributed to protecting workers from the lowest wages, has been largely employment-neutral, and has had little impact on competition between companies. However, reduced working hours indicate that, as a result of the introduction of the minimum wage, employersor employeeshave been rerouting, using an alternative channel to control the volume of work.The effects identified mainly result from the introduction of the minimum wage and not from its increase. The extent of non-compliance can hardly be quantified: The statutory minimum wage is being circumvented by an unknown number of companies using partially illegal practices. In this respect further research is neededas well as with regard to the medium and long-term effects of the minimum wage

First Report of Circulating MicroRNAs in Tumour Necrosis Factor Receptor-Associated Periodic Syndrome (TRAPS)

Tumor necrosis factor-receptor associated periodic syndrome (TRAPS) is a rare autosomal dominant autoinflammatory disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of long-lasting fever and inflammation in different regions of the body, such as the musculo-skeletal system, skin, gastrointestinal tract, serosal membranes and eye. Our aims were to evaluate circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) levels in patients with TRAPS, in comparison to controls without inflammatory diseases, and to correlate their levels with parameters of disease activity and/or disease severity. Expression levels of circulating miRNAs were measured by Agilent microarrays in 29 serum samples from 15 TRAPS patients carrying mutations known to be associated with high disease penetrance and from 8 controls without inflammatory diseases. Differentially expressed and clinically relevant miRNAs were detected using GeneSpring GX software. We identified a 6 miRNAs signature able to discriminate TRAPS from controls. Moreover, 4 miRNAs were differentially expressed between patients treated with the interleukin (IL)-1 receptor antagonist, anakinra, and untreated patients. Of these, miR-92a-3p and miR-150-3p expression was found to be significantly reduced in untreated patients, while their expression levels were similar to controls in samples obtained during anakinra treatment. MiR-92b levels were inversely correlated with the number of fever attacks/year during the 1st year from the index attack of TRAPS, while miR-377-5p levels were positively correlated with serum amyloid A (SAA) circulating levels. Our data suggest that serum miRNA levels show a baseline pattern in TRAPS, and may serve as potential markers of response to therapeutic intervention

Learn to relax : Integrating 0-1 integer linear programming with pseudo-Boolean conflict-driven search

Conflict-driven pseudo-Boolean solvers optimize 0-1 integer linear programs by extending the conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) paradigm from SAT solving. Though pseudo-Boolean solvers have the potential to be exponentially more efficient than CDCL solvers in theory, in practice they can sometimes get hopelessly stuck even when the linear programming (LP) relaxation is infeasible over the reals. Inspired by mixed integer programming (MIP), we address this problem by interleaving incremental LP solving with cut generation within the conflict-driven pseudo-Boolean search. This hybrid approach, which for the first time combines MIP techniques with full-blown conflict analysis operating directly on linear inequalities using the cutting planes method, significantly improves performance on a wide range of benchmarks, approaching a “best-of-both-worlds” scenario between SAT-style conflict-driven search and MIP-style branch-and-cut

A diving heuristic for mixed-integer problems with unbounded semi-continuous variables

Semi-continuous decision variables arise naturally in many real-world applications. They are defined to take either value zero or any value within a specified range, and occur mainly to prevent small nonzero values in the solution. One particular challenge that can come with semi-continuous variables in practical models is that their upper bound may be large or even infinite. In this article, we briefly discuss these challenges, and present a new diving heuristic tailored for mixed-integer optimization problems with general semi-continuous variables. The heuristic is designed to work independently of whether the semi-continuous variables are bounded from above, and thus circumvents the specific difficulties that come with unbounded semi-continuous variables. We conduct extensive computational experiments on three different test sets, integrating the heuristic in an open-source MIP solver. The results indicate that this heuristic is a successful tool for finding high-quality solutions in negligible time. At the root node the primal gap is reduced by an average of 5 % up to 21 %, and considering the overall performance improvement, the primal integral is reduced by 2 % to 17 % on average

The SCIP optimization suite 5.0

This article describes new features and enhanced algorithms made available in version 5.0 of the SCIP Optimization Suite. In its central component, the constraint integer programming solver SCIP, remarkable performance improvements have been achieved for solving mixed-integer linear and nonlinear programs. On MIPs, SCIP 5.0 is about 41 % faster than SCIP 4.0 and over twice as fast on instances that take at least 100 seconds to solve. For MINLP, SCIP 5.0 is about 17 % faster overall and 23 % faster on instances that take at least 100 seconds to solve. This boost is due to algorithmic advances in several parts of the solver such as cutting plane generation and management, a new adaptive coordination of large neighborhood search heuristics, symmetry handling, and strengthened McCormick relaxations for bilinear terms in MINLPs. Besides discussing the theoretical background and the implementational aspects of these developments, the report describes recent additions for the other software packages connected to SCIP, in particular for the LP solver SoPlex, the Steiner tree solver SCIP-Jack, the MISDP solver SCIP-SDP, and the parallelization framework UG