New Technologies, Workplace Organisation and the Age Structure of the Workforce: Firm-Level Evidence

This paper investigates the relationships between new technologies, innovative workplace practices and the age structure of the workforce in a sample of French manufacturing firms. We find evidence that the wage bill share of older workers is lower in innovative firms and that the opposite holds for younger workers. This age bias is also evidenced within occupational groups, thus suggesting that skills do not completely protect workers against the labour market consequences of ageing. More detailed analysis of employment inflows and outflows shows that new technologies essentially affect older workers through reduced hiring opportunities, whereas organisational innovations mainly increase their probability of exit. This suggests that some skill obsolescence may be at work in our sample.new work practices, technology, older workers, labour demand

Competitiveness in the Quarterly Business Survey in Goods-Producing Industries

This working paper aims at assessing the quality and relevance of firms statements about their own « competitiveness » within the French Quarterly Business Survey in goods-producing industries. A higher competitiveness at the individual level is significantly correlated with higher sales, higher production, lower costs of materials and lower labour costs. However this correlation concerns raw values, not values relative to other firms in the sector. This result should warn us against what firms truly mean while stating the way their competitiveness evolves: they might indicate variations of the economic situation or business conditions, rather than a true evolution of their market situation relative to competitors. We sum up firm-level statements about competitiveness into an aggregate competitiveness index. This index seems fairly well correlated with other common « competitiveness » indices, such as aggregate labour productivity, exchange rates or aggregate costs relative to foreign competitors.competitiveness, Business Survey

Time Reversal Violation from the entangled B0-antiB0 system

We discuss the concepts and methodology to implement an experiment probing directly Time Reversal (T) non-invariance, without any experimental connection to CP violation, by the exchange of "in" and "out" states. The idea relies on the B0-antiB0 entanglement and decay time information available at B factories. The flavor or CP tag of the state of the still living neutral meson by the first decay of its orthogonal partner overcomes the problem of irreversibility for unstable systems, which prevents direct tests of T with incoherent particle states. T violation in the time evolution between the two decays means experimentally a difference between the intensities for the time-ordered (l^+ X, J/psi K_S) and (J/psi K_L, l^- X) decays, and three other independent asymmetries. The proposed strategy has been applied to simulated data samples of similar size and features to those currently available, from which we estimate the significance of the expected discovery to reach many standard deviations.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, 6 table

Current management of pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a vascular disease of unknown aetiology, characterised by an abnormal thickening of the arterial wall that is responsible for an increase in pulmonary vascular resistance. The haemodynamic consequence of PAH is an increased afterload for the right ventricle and, eventually, right heart failure. When untreated, PAH has a grim prognosis with a median survival of about 2 to 4 years from diagnosis. In the last 10 years new orally administered compounds have demonstrated clinical efficacy in controlled trials using various surrogate endpoints to survival. Although the disease remains without cure until now, the available phase III trials have allowed evidence-based recommendations for the medical management of these patients to be established. It appears, however, that none of the compounds from the three main therapeutic classes, endothelin receptor antagonists, agents acting on the nitric oxide-cyclic guanosine monophosphate pathway (including phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors and guanylate cyclase stimulator), and prostanoid receptor agonists are able alone to control disease progression in every patient. Therefore combination therapy with two or three drugs may be necessary in a significant number of patients in order to maintain patients in, or bring them to, a low risk profile. Several recent studies have now validated this approach for specific double or triple drug regimens. It remains, however, unclear whether an upfront combination is preferable to a sequential step-up approach based on clinical response. In addition, some specific combination therapies have failed to demonstrate superiority to single drug alone in randomised controlled trials. Besides PAH-specific treatment, the place of nonspecific pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical treatment has been also recently clarified

Using untagged B^0 -> D K_S to determine gamma

It is shown that the weak phase gamma=arg(-V_{ud}V^*_{ub}V_{cb}V_{cd}^*) can be determined using only untagged decays B/Bbar--> D K_S. In order to reduce the uncertainty in gamma, we suggest combining information from B^{+-}--> DK^{+-} and from untagged B^0 decays, where the D meson is observed in common decay modes. Theoretical assumptions, which may further reduce the statistical error, are also discussed.Comment: 18 pages, same as published versio

Semileptonic Bs ->DsJ(2460)l nu decay in QCD

Using three point QCD sum rules method, the form factors relevant to the semileptonic Bs ->DsJ (2460)l nu decay are calculated. The q2 dependence of these form factors is evaluated and compared with the heavy quark effective theory predictions. The dependence of the asymmetry parameter alpha, characterizing the polarization of DsJ meson, on q2 is studied .The branching ratio of this decay is also estimated and is shown that it can be easily detected at LHC.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures and 1 Tabl

Light hadron, Charmonium(-like) and Bottomonium(-like) states

Hadron physics represents the study of strongly interacting matter in all its manifestations and the understanding of its properties and interactions. The interest on this field has been revitalized by the discovery of new light hadrons, charmonium- and bottomonium-like states. I review the most recent experimental results from different experiments.Comment: Presented at Lepton-Photon 2011, Mumbai, India; 21 pages, 18 figures; add more references; some correctio

The UTfit Collaboration Average of D meson mixing data: Spring 2012

We derive constraints on the parameters $M_{12}$, $\Gamma_{12}$ and $\Phi_{12}$ that describe $D$ meson mixing using all available data, allowing for CP violation. We also provide posterior distributions and predictions for observable parameters appearing in $D$ physics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Elastic and inelastic SU(3)-breaking final-state interactions in B decays to pseudoscalar mesons

We discuss all contributions from Zweig-rule-satisfying SU(3)-breaking final state interactions (FSIs)in the B -> PP decays (neglecting charmed intermediate states), where PP=pi pi, pi K, KK, pi eta (eta'), and K eta (eta'). First, effects of SU(3) breaking in rescattering through Pomeron exchange are studied. Then, after making a plausible assumption concerning the pattern of SU(3) breaking in non-Pomeron FSIs, we give general formulas for how the latter modify short-distance (SD) amplitudes. In the SU(3) limit, these formulas depend on three effective parameters characterizing the strength of all non-Pomeron rescattering effects. We point out that the experimental bounds on the B -> K^+K^- branching ratio may limit the value of only one of these FSI parameters. Thus, the smallness of the B -> K^+K^- decay rate does not imply negligible rescattering effects in other decays. Assuming a vanishing value of this parameter, we perform various fits to the available B -> PP branching ratios. The fits determine the quark-diagram SD amplitudes, the two remaining FSI parameters and the weak angle gamma. While the set of all B -> PP branching ratios is well described with gamma around its expected SM value, the fits permit other values of gamma as well. For a couple of such good fits, we predict asymmetries for the B -> K pi, pi^+ eta (eta'), K^+ eta (eta') decays as well as the values of the CP-violating parameters S_{pi pi} and C_{pi pi} for the time-dependent rate of B^0(t) -> pi^+ pi^-. Apart from a problem with the recent B^+ -> pi^+ eta asymmetry measurement, comparison with the data seems to favour the values of gamma in accordance with SM expectations.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure