9,159 research outputs found
Why Do Americans and Germans Work Different Hours?
This paper documents the difference between the annual hours worked by employed Americans and Germans, decomposes the difference into differences due to vacation and holiday time and to hours worked while on the job, and examines alternative explanations for the difference. Employed Americans work roughly 10-15% more hours than Germans. Since American employment-population rates exceed those of Germans, adult Americans average some 20% more work time than adult Germans. At the same time, Americans show greater preference for additional hours worked than do Germans. Both of these differences developed in the past 20 years. Two decades ago, Americans worked less than Germans, and it was the Germans who wanted to work more hours. Standard labor supply analyses do not appear able to explain this difference. We show that differences in hours worked are related to differences in earnings inequality across countries, and hypothesize that the high rewards to success in the U.S., lack of job security, and low social safety net compared to Germany or other European countries may explain the cross-country differences in an extended supply model.
Daring to Lead 2006
Presents findings from a survey that examines why nonprofit executives leave their jobs. Offers recommendations for strengthening and supporting current leadership, creating more diversity, and developing the next generation of nonprofit leaders
Does a Flexible Industry Wage Structure Increase Employment?: The U.S. Experience
This paper examines the flexibility of wages across industries inthe U.S. and seeks to determine the potential impact which changes in the industrial wage structure may have for employment. With regard to the flexibility of wages across industries, we find that the U.S., alone among the major OECD countries, has experienced substantial changes in the industry wage structure since 1970, with the variation of log wages among industries increasing dramatically, particularly in the 1970s. This represents a widening of the gap between wages in the high and low wage sectors. In order to evaluate these changes, we estimate equations linking changes in industry wages over an extended period of time to a variety of potential wage determining characteristics. We find that industrial wages are positively correlated with value productivity per worker, even after controlling for institutional and supply side factors which may have contributed to the increased dispersion of wages in the 1970s. Our results are not consistent with the standard competitive model of industry labor markets, in which wages and productivity are uncorrelated across sectors and wages depend on aggregate, rather than sectoral conditions.With regard to the impact of a flexible industry wage structure on employment, we evaluate the circumstances under which flexible wages among industries may be employment enhancing, and the set of circumstances under which flexible wages are likely to be employment reducing. For the U.S.economy in the 1970s we find that the data support the latter set of circumstances. The bottom line of the U.S. experience is that flexible wages by industry have not contributed to employment growth.
A Bayesian Classifier for Photometric Redshifts: Identification of high redshift clusters
Photometric redshift classifiers provide a means of estimating galaxy
redshifts from observations using a small number of broad-band filters.
However, the accuracy with which redshifts can be determined is sensitive to
the star formation history of the galaxy, for example the effects of age,
metallicity and on-going star formation. We present a photometric classifier
that explicitly takes into account the degeneracies implied by these
variations, based on the flexible stellar population synthesis code of Kodama &
Arimoto. The situation is encouraging since many of the variations in stellar
populations introduce colour changes that are degenerate. We use a Bayesian
inversion scheme to estimate the likely range of redshifts compatible with the
observed colours. When applied to existing multi-band photometry for Abell 370,
most of the cluster members are correctly recovered with little field
contamination. The inverter is focussed on the recovery of a wide variety of
galaxy populations in distant (z~1) clusters from broad band colours covering
the 4000 angstrom break. It is found that this can be achieved with impressive
accuracy (), allowing detailed investigation into the
evolution of cluster galaxies with little selection bias.Comment: 18 pages, including 15 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA
Getting the unemployed back to work: the role of targeted wage subsidies
This paper examines alternative approaches to wage subsidy programmes. It does this in the context of a recent active labour market reform for the young unemployed in Britain. This ÓŽew DealÔ reform and the characteristics of the target group are examined in detail. We discuss theoretical considerations, survey the existing empirical evidence and propose two strategies for evaluation. The first suggests an expost Ñ´rend adjusted diÄ¥rence in diÄ¥rence' estimator. The second, relates to a model based ex-ante evaluation. We present the conditions for each to provide a reliable evaluation and Å´ some of the crucial parameters using data from the British Labour Force Survey. We stress that the success of this type of labour market programmes hinge on dynamic aspects of the youth labour market, in particular the pay-off to experience and training.
Topological Physics of Little Higgs Bosons
Topological interactions will generally occur in composite Higgs or Little
Higgs theories, extra-dimensional gauge theories in which A_5 plays the role of
a Higgs boson, and amongst the pNGB's of technicolor. This phenomena arises
from the chiral and anomaly structure of the underlying UV completion theory,
and/or through chiral delocalization in higher dimensions. These effects are
described by a full Wess-Zumino-Witten term involving gauge fields and pNGB's.
We give a general discussion of these interactions, some of which may have
novel signatures at future colliders, such as the LHC and ILC.Comment: 22 page
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