Work to Live or Live to Work? Unemployment, Happiness, and Culture

Happiness drops when individuals become unemployed. The negative impact of the unemployment shock, however, may differ by cultural background. To test the hypothesis of a 'Teutonic work ethic', this paper takes advantage of Switzerland in its cultural diversity. By comparing different cultural groups in the same institutional setting, I empirically test whether such deep psychological traits have an influence on how unemployment is perceived. It is found that unemployment has a significantly negative effect on life satisfaction in Switzerland. I furthermore present evidence which confirms to some extent the hypothesis that Swiss German individuals suffer more from unemployment, although for the most part, these results are without statistical significance. Swiss Germans are additionally found to be happier than their French-speaking compatriots – independent of whether they are unemployed. This difference between Romanic and Germanic cultural backgrounds is in line with previous findings, but deserves further research attention.life satisfaction, unemployment, cultural differences, Switzerland

An expectation transformer approach to predicate abstraction and data independence for probabilistic programs

In this paper we revisit the well-known technique of predicate abstraction to characterise performance attributes of system models incorporating probability. We recast the theory using expectation transformers, and identify transformer properties which correspond to abstractions that yield nevertheless exact bound on the performance of infinite state probabilistic systems. In addition, we extend the developed technique to the special case of "data independent" programs incorporating probability. Finally, we demonstrate the subtleness of the extended technique by using the PRISM model checking tool to analyse an infinite state protocol, obtaining exact bounds on its performance

The BBC Persian Service and the Islamic Revolution of 1979

This paper is the second part of a work in progress that examines the impact of seventy years of BBC Persian broadcasts to Iran. The Persian Service, established in December 1940, was originally set up by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as one of thirty-eight language services broadcasting to strategically important areas of the world during World War Two. The first piece of research looked at three historic moments when the influence of BBC Persian broadcasts was hotly debated: the toppling of the pro-German Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, in 1941; the late 1940s, when Iran's nationalist leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, championed oil nationalization and challenged the rights hitherto enjoyed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and the US-led coup of 1953 that returned the young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne. The present research focuses on a period that many Iranians consider the most influential in terms of all BBC broadcasts to Iran. The BBC Persian Service (BBCPS) became a household name during 1978, the year leading up to the revolution of 11 February 1979. Many Iranians at home and abroad tuned in to hear the latest news and developments, even as the Shah of Iran accused the BBC of fomenting revolution, an argument echoed thirty years later in the responses of the Islamic Republic to the launch of the new Persian television channel in January 2009. The research shows clearly how difficult it had become for the FCO to uphold the independence of the BBC and support their closest friend in the region when he believed that the British government must be in charge. There was indeed heated debate and discussion inside the Foreign Office as to whether Britain was sacrificing its long-term interests by allowing the BBC to continue its broadcasts when even the British ambassador in Tehran was suggesting the service should be closed down

What can changes in structural factors tell us about unemployment in Europe?

This paper examines the impact of temporal variation in labour market institutions and other structural factors on unemployment in Europe. These include the influence of trade unions, social security benefits, employment security, mismatch between job seekers and vacancies, the minimum wage and factors which drive a wedge between consumer and producer prices. With this aim, a system including a labour demand and a wage equation is estimated in pooled time-series data for the six largest EU countries for the 1980s and 1990s, allowing for country-specific fixed-effects, institutional effects and adjustment terms. Our estimates suggest that changes in regional mismatch, trade union density and the ratio between consumer and producer prices are positively associated with structural unemployment. This result is robust to a wide variety of different specifications of the model, including a larger sample of eight EU countries. No consistent role is found for the other institutional factors. JEL Classification: E24, J30, C33Labour market institutions, panel estimation, structural unemployment

Probabilistic Rely-guarantee Calculus

Jones' rely-guarantee calculus for shared variable concurrency is extended to include probabilistic behaviours. We use an algebraic approach which combines and adapts probabilistic Kleene algebras with concurrent Kleene algebra. Soundness of the algebra is shown relative to a general probabilistic event structure semantics. The main contribution of this paper is a collection of rely-guarantee rules built on top of that semantics. In particular, we show how to obtain bounds on probabilities by deriving rely-guarantee rules within the true-concurrent denotational semantics. The use of these rules is illustrated by a detailed verification of a simple probabilistic concurrent program: a faulty Eratosthenes sieve.Comment: Preprint submitted to TCS-QAP