Employment Expectations and Gross Flows by Type of Work Contract

There is growing interest in understanding firms’ temporary and permanent employment practices and how institutional changes shape them. Using data on Spanish establishments, we examine: (a) how employers adjust temporary and permanent job and worker flows to prior employment expectations, and (b) how the 1994 and 1997 labour reforms promoting permanent employment affected establishments’ employment practices. Generally, establishments’ prior employment expectations are realized through changes in all job and worker flows. However, establishments uniquely rely on temporary hires as a buffer to confront diminishing long-run employment expectations. None of the reforms significantly affected establishments’ net temporary or permanent employment flows.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40032/3/wp646.pd

Austerity-Driven Labour Market Reforms in Southern Europe: Eroding the Security of Labour Market Insiders

The sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone and increased pressures for ‘structural reform’ have led to a period of intensive change in labour market policy in Southern Europe. Examining the cases of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, this article focuses on the security of labour market insiders, a key group in labour markets that is highly segmented. Th e security of labour market insiders is conceptualised as consisting of security in employment (protection against dismissals) and security in unemployment (protection against drops in income provided by unemployment insurance and assistance). Using changes in national laws, the article charts and compares labour market change along these two dimensions across these four Southern European countries. Because labour market reform has not been restricted to Southern Europe, the article also compares these developments to broader changes in the countries of the Eurozone, using OECD and MISSOC data. Having demonstrated the degree to which the security of labour market insiders has diminished, the article concludes with an agenda for research on the policy dynamics of Southern European labour market reform in the wake of the fi nancial crisis

Flexibility and Fairness in Liberal Market Economies: The Comparative Impact of the Legal Environment and High Performance Work Systems

This paper compares management flexibility in employment decision-making in the United States and Canada through a cross-national survey of organizations in representative jurisdictions in each country, Pennsylvania and Ontario respectively, that investigates the impact of differences in their legal environments. The results indicate that, compared to their Ontario counterparts, organizations in Pennsylvania have a higher degree of flexibility in employment outcomes, such as higher dismissal and discipline rates, yet do not experience any greater flexibility or simplicity in management hiring and firing decisions. One explanation for this result may lie in the finding that organizations in Pennsylvania experience greater legal pressures on decision making, reflecting the generally more intense conflict in the employment law system in the United States. By contrast, high performance work systems, which some have looked to as a possible management-driven mechanism for enhancing fairness in employment, had more modest effects

PPR proteins - orchestrators of organelle RNA metabolism.

Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins are important RNA regulators in chloroplasts and mitochondria, aiding in RNA editing, maturation, stabilisation or intron splicing, and in transcription and translation of organellar genes. In this review, we summarise all PPR proteins documented so far in plants and the green alga Chlamydomonas. By further analysis of the known target RNAs from Arabidopsis thaliana PPR proteins, we find that all organellar-encoded complexes are regulated by these proteins, although to differing extents. In particular, the orthologous complexes of NADH dehydrogenase (Complex I) in the mitochondria and NADH dehydrogenase-like (NDH) complex in the chloroplast were the most regulated, with respectively 60 and 28% of all characterised A. thaliana PPR proteins targeting their genes

The RNA Editing Pattern of cox2 mRNA Is Affected by Point Mutations in Plant Mitochondria

The mitochondrial transcriptome from land plants undergoes hundreds of specific C-to-U changes by RNA editing. These events are important since most of them occur in the coding region of mRNAs. One challenging question is to understand the mechanism of recognition of a selected C residue (editing sites) on the transcript. It has been reported that a short region surrounding the target C forms the cis-recognition elements, but individual residues on it do not play similar roles for the different editing sites. Here, we studied the role of the −1 and +1 nucleotide in wheat cox2 editing site recognition using an in organello approach. We found that four different recognition patterns can be distinguished: (a) +1 dependency, (b) −1 dependency, (c) +1/−1 dependency, and (d) no dependency on nearest neighbor residues. A striking observation was that whereas a 23 nt cis region is necessary for editing, some mutants affect the editing efficiency of unmodified distant sites. As a rule, mutations or pre-edited variants of the transcript have an impact on the complete set of editing targets. When some Cs were changed into Us, the remaining editing sites presented a higher efficiency of C-to-U conversion than in wild type mRNA. Our data suggest that the complex response observed for cox2 mRNA may be a consequence of the fate of the transcript during mitochondrial gene expression