The Dilemma of Delegating Search: Budgeting in Public Employment Service

The Recent German research has suggested that extending the number of caseworkers may have a very positive effect on PES performance. The present paper accepts this key insight but argues that there are other factors that may independently drive outcomes and in particular local agents’ discretion. That is, it focuses on the delegation problem between the central office and the local job center ‘matchmakers.’ Because their (search) effort in contacting employers and collecting data is not verifiable by the central authority, a typical moral hazard problem can arise. To overcome the delegation problem and provide high‐powered incentives for increased levels of search effort on the part of job centers, we propose output‐related schemes that assign greater staff capacity to agencies achieving high strike rates.matching unemployment, public employment service, active labor market policy, moral hazard, search theory

The Dilemma of Delegating Search: Budgeting in Public Employment Services

The poor performance often attributed to many public employment services may be explained in part by a delegation problem between the central office and local job centers. In markets characterized by frictions, job centers function as match-makers, linking job seekers with relevant vacancies. Because their search intensity in contacting employers and collecting data is not verifiable by the central authority, a typical moral hazard problem can arise. To overcome the delegation problem and provide high-powered incentives for high levels of search effort on the part of job centers, we propose output-related schemes that assign greater staff capacity to agencies achieving high strike rates.matching unemployment, public employment service, delegation problem, moral hazard, search theory

Policies to Internalize Reciprocal International Spillovers

An effective policy scheme to overcome the suboptimal low provision levels of global public goods is developed in this paper. By suggesting a decentralized approach to raise environmental public good provision levels we take account of the lack of a coercive global authority that is able to enforce efficient international environmental regulations. In our model individual regions voluntarily commence international negotiations on public good provision, which are accompanied by side-payments. These side-payments are financed by means of regional externality-correcting taxes. Side-payments and national tax rates are designed in a mutually dependent way. The decentralized scheme we recommend for approaching Pareto efficient Nash equilibria is based on the ideas of Coasean negotiations and Pigouvian taxes. As it is implementable for a wide class of Nash solutions, it is applicable to various international externality problems.transfers, environmental taxation

Three-Dimensional Imaging of Nerve Tissue by X-Ray Phase-Contrast Microtomography

AbstractWe show that promising information about the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a peripheral nerve can be obtained by x-ray phase-contrast microtomography (p-μCT; Beckmann, F., U. Bonse, F. Busch, and O. Günnewig, 1997. J. Comp. Assist. Tomogr. 21:539–553). P-μCT measures electronic charge density, which for most substances is proportional to mass density in fairly good approximation. The true point-by-point variation of density is thus determined in 3D at presently 1 mg/cm3 standard error (SE). The intracranial part of the rat trigeminal nerve analyzed for the presence of early schwannoma “microtumors” displayed a detailed density structure on p-μCT density maps. The average density of brain and nerve tissue was measured to range from 0.990 to 0.994g/cm3 and from 1.020 to 1.035g/cm3, respectively. The brain-nerve interface was well delineated. Within the nerve tissue, a pattern of nerve fibers could be seen that followed the nerve axis and contrasted against the bulk by 7 to 10mg/cm3 density modulation. Based on the fact that regions of tumor growth have an increased number density of cell nuclei, and hence of the higher z element phosphorus, it may become possible to detect very early neural “microtumors” through increases of average density on the order of 10 to 15mg/cm3 by using this method