What’s new since the April 2013 STIM IR Subcommittee Report to COLD: Hydra, Islandora and Dspace

Aaron Collier, Digital Repository Services Manager, Chancellor’s Office Suzanna Conrad, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Cal Poly Pomona Carmen Mitchell, Institutional Repository Librarian, CSU San Marcos Joan Parker, Librarian, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories Andrew Weiss, Digital Services Librarian, CSU Northridge Jeremy Shellhase, Head of Information Services & Systems Department, Humboldt State Universit

The Effect of Job Complexity on Job Satisfaction: Evidence From Turnover and Absenteeism

Usinga detailed sample of semi-skilled production workers we find that holding a wide range of personal and job-related characteristics constant, workers assigned to more complex jobs seem to be more likely to quit than are workers assigned to simpler jobs. Job complexity has no discernible effect on absenteeism. Matching better educated workers to more complex jobs affects neither absenteeism nor quit propensity. Thus it appears that experimental evidence suggesting that job enlargement increases worker satisfaction is likely to stem from the experimental design: asking for volunteers to be assigned more complex jobs, and improving the quality of supervision for workers assigned to more complex jobs.

Towards a Beautiful Japan: Right-Wing Religious Nationalism in Japan\u27s LDP

A 2017-2018 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Andrew Weiss (Davenport College \u2718) for his essay submitted to the East Asian Studies Program, Towards a Beautiful Japan: Right-Wing Religious Nationalism in Japan\u27s LDP” (Frances Rosenbluth, Damon Wells Professor of Political Science, advisor). Andrew Weiss, a double major in East Asian Studies and Global Affairs, spent several months of field work in Japan over the summer and winter of 2017 to understand the role of right-wing Shinto in the thinking and politics of the Liberal Democratic Party. Why is the LDP and Abe in particular clinging to fringe ideas at a possible electoral cost? Weiss, with assiduous digging through multiple kinds of written work and by interviewing dozens of politicians, journalists, religionists, and regular citizens, uncovered how the right-wing faction in the LDP is able to hide behind Abe’s economy-first platform, while also flooding social media with nationalist interpretations shunned by the mainstream conservative press like the Yomiuri. Weiss’ dogged tenacity to track down the parts of the puzzle helped to make his thesis, “Towards a Beautiful Japan: Right-Wing Religious Nationalism in Japan\u27s LDP,” a truly impressive piece of scholarly work

Capital Markets and Economic Fluctuations in Capitalist Economies

Marshall Lecture delivered to the European Economic Association Meetings, Cambridge, U.K., 1991. Financial support from the National Science Foundation and the Hoover Institution is gratefully acknowledged. This paper reports on joint work with Bruce Greenwald. I am also indebted to my other co-authors with whom I have been engaged in research on the issues discussed in this paper, in particular, to Andrew Weiss; and to K. Hoff, Marco Da Rin and Andrés Rodríguez for helpful comments on a previous draft

On the Negative Correlation Between Performance and Experience and Education

We consider a model where a worker's productivity must exceed some lower bound for himto satisfy the minimum qualifications for a particular job. If the worker's productivity exceeds some upper bound he is promoted. We assume the productivity of every worker increases with experience, tenure and education. This relationship differs across workers. We present distributions of workers with the property that, among workers on a particular job, education, experience, or tenure is negatively correlated with productivity; even though for any single worker on that job those demographic characteristics have strongly positive effects on productivity. The result is due to the effect of the job assignment rule on the distribution of workers on the job.

Validating Hiring Criteria

We construct a model in which firms use workers' productivities in determining their job assignments. A worker's productivity must exceed some lower bound to satisfy the minimum qualifications for a particular job. If the worker's productivity exceeds some upper bound he is promoted. Under these conditions it is possible that the better educated and more experienced individuals would be the least productive workers on every job, even though, for each worker, education and experience increases his productivity. Whether this anomalous result occurs depends on the underlying distribution of ability in the population and the job assignment policy delineated above. One implication of our analysis is that firms that use hiring criteria that accurately predict a worker's success on the job may not be able to validate those criteria through measurements of the performance of the workers that they had hired. EEOC rules that require hiring criteria to be validated in that fashion may penalize firms with the most efficient hiring and promotion standards.

Sorting Out the Differences Between Signaling and Screening Models

In this paper we analyze games in which there is trade between informed and uninformed players. The informed know the value of the trade (for instance, the value of their productivity in a labor market example); the uninformed only know the distribution of attributes among the informed. The informed choose actions (education levels in the Spence model); the uninformed choose prices (wages of interest rates). We refer to games in which the informed move first as signaling games - they choose actions to signal their type. Games when the uninformed move first are referred to as screening games. We show that in sequential equilibria of screening games same contracts can generate positive profits and others negative profits, while in signaling games all contracts break even. However, if the indifference carves of the informed agents satisfy what roughly would amount to a single crossing property in two dimensions, and some technical conditions hold, then all contacts in the screening game break even, and the set of outcomes of the screening game is a subset of the outcomes of the corresponding signaling game. In the postscript we take a broad view of the strengths and weakness of the approach taken in this and other papers to problems of asymmetric information, and present recommendations for how future research should proceed in this field.

Banks as Social Accountants and Screening Devices for the Allocation of Credit

This paper presents and alternative perspective on the role of banks. We emphasize the ways in which banks act as social accountants and screening devices. In this view monetary disturbances have their effects through the disturbances which they induce in society's accounting system and in the mechanisms by which it is ascertained who is credit worthy. Because of asymmetric information, giving rise to credit rationing, interest rates do not play the simple allocative role ascribed by the conventional paradigm, and as a result the equilibrating forces provided by market mechanisms may be weak or virtually absent. The paper provides a critique of the transactions based approach to monetary theory, and sketches a general equilibrium formulation of the theory. The paper traces out some of the policy implications of the theory. We show that certain financial innovations, such as allowing for the more rapid recording of transactions, may actually be welfare reducing.

Macro-Economic Equilibrium and Credit Rationing

In this paper we investigate the macro-economic equilibria of an economy in which credit contracts have both adverse selection and incentive effects. The terms of credit contracts include both an interest rate and a collateral requirement. We show that in this richer model all types of borrowers may be rationed. Interest rates charged borrowers may move either pro or counter-cyclically. If pro-cyclical shocks have a greater effect on the success probabilities of risky techniques than on safe ones, then the interest rate offered depositors may also move counter-cyclically. Finally, we show that the impact of monetary policy on the macro-economic equilibrium is affected by whether or not the economy is in a regime in which credit is rationed.