Wage subsidies and international trade: when does policy coordination pay?

National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, a fact widely ignored in the academic literature. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an international duopoly model with unionised labour markets. We document both positive and negative spill-over effects and discuss the benefits and costs from international policy coordination both for the case of symmetric and asymmetric labour market institutions. Our results suggest that institutional differences could sign responsible for the slow speed at which labour market policy coordination has progressed so far

A Thomistic Reading of Small-Scale Uses of Force

This thesis makes both a substantive and methodological contribution to knowledge. Firstly, it assesses the moral issue of a worrisome increase in the use of small-scale force post-9/11 from a Thomistic just war perspective. Concentrating on one such use of force, namely the practice of targeted killing, it engages in a “renegotiation” of the inherited Thomistic jus ad bellum in order to address the moral questions raised by this recent development in military conduct. Secondly, the thesis seeks to recover the method of traditional casuistry built around the ethics of Aquinas. Employing “Thomistic casuistry” can, it will be argued, approximate the analytical rigour of the revisionist just war while it does not have to disregard the use of history for moral reflection. In addition, “Thomistic casuistry,” as a distinct “third-way” approach to just war, is capable of triggering an exchange between Walzerians and revisionists, the two dominating contemporary approaches which have faced each other in a “war of ethics within the ethics of war.

Bemerkungen über die Duldung der Juden, und den ihnen, so wie den nicht anlässigen fremden Kaufleuten verbotenen Handel

http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b1437665~S1*es

Post-growth perspectives in Economic Geography

No abstract necessar

Classification of Outsourcing Phenomena in Financial Services

Financial service companies have developed a wide variety of outsourcing phenomena over the course of recent years. The goal of this paper is to conceptualize these phenomena to the extent that they can be specified in descriptive dimensions, thus making it possible to differentiate between different outsourcing scenarios. This classification will form the basis for the subsequent development of scenario-specific methods. Only then will it be possible for companies in the financial services sector to depart from their previous approach to outsourcing which up to now has largely been individual if not intuitive in many cases. Instead, they will be able to systematically analyze which outsourcing scenario applies to them, and adopt methods developed for the respective scenario while drawing on the experiences of other companies in comparable situations. Based on interviews and the discussion of related work, a four dimensional framework and appropriate scales are proposed. Using references to the “outsourced components”, “outsourced activities”, “service individualization” and “degree of independence” dimensions, respectively, various current outsourcing phenomena are then classified

Integrative Risk Assessment of Endocrine Disruptors in Switzerland

The objective of the project was to develop an environmental fate model for various substances with endocrine-disrupting potential for the Glattal/Greifensee region in Switzerland and to assess the concentration levels. The model provides an estimate of environmental concentrations based on mass flow calculations from the source of the emissions to the final fate in the environmental compartments. Based on the chemical properties of 20 substances studied in the NRP50 program, the estimated quantities of the substances used and their respective applications, the model predicts mass flows on a local level. Taking into account the respective water flows, these mass flows result in predicted environmental concentrations in surface water and groundwater. These concentrations can be interpreted as averaged levels with geographical resolution in the local scenario. The estrogenic equivalent concentration was assessed by estrogenic equivalence factor-weighted addition of the individual substance concentrations for four different toxicological endpoints. From the 20 substances modelled in this project only a few substantially contribute to the overall endocrine disruption potential. For three of the endpoints used the steroid hormones dominate the endocrine potential. Only the application of the yeast estrogen system (YES) assay predicts a dominant endocrine potential for the degradation products of nonylphenol-poly-ethoxylates (NPnEO) in the year 2004, which was expected to decrease significantly in the year 2007 due to new legislation (almost complete application ban of NPnEO-based detergents as of August 2006). On the basis of the model's geographical resolution it is possible to identify 'hot spots' in terms of high endocrine-disruption potential in the modelled region. For the densely populated and industrialised Glattal/Greifensee region sewage treatment plants discharging into relatively small receiving water systems show the highest endocrine disruption potential (estradiol equivalence concentration of up to 2 ng/l for the vitellogenin synthesis induction endpoint). In addition to modelling the status quo with respect to endocrine disruption possible future risk reduction measures have been assessed for one identified hot-spot. Whereas an increase in sludge retention time in the existing STP had a moderate effect on the overall endocrine potential, an additional ozonation step showed significant reduction for most endocrine-disrupting substances

Unraveling Tumor Suppressor Networks with In Vivo RNAi

BMI1 is a known oncogenic transcriptional repressor in glioblastoma stem-like cells, but its downstream mediators are poorly understood. Recently, in Cancer Cell, Gargiulo et al. (2013) designed a rational in vivo RNAi screen based on BMI1 ChIP-seq from neural progenitors and identified functional tumor suppressor targets, including Atf3 and Cbx7