An evaluation of the public relations program as it pertains to employee layoffs of a textile mill

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Effects of the 2008-09 economic crisis on labor markets in Mexico

The 2008-09 economic crisis has had a long-lasting negative impact on the Mexican economy. This paper examines labor market dynamics in Mexico in light of the crisis. The labor market has been characterized in recent years by low relative unemployment, but high levels of informal jobs, low-growth, and almost stagnant real wages. In this context, the crisis destroyed a wide number of formal jobs, and even informal, increasing the unemployment rates to pre-crisis levels. Manufacturing was the sector that endured the largest job losses during the crisis and wages decreased for all sectors. The government of Mexico implemented a variety of programs to cope with the crises. However, these measures were too limited to counteract the large negative impact of the crisis on labor markets.Labor Markets,Labor Policies,Population Policies,Labor Standards,Economic Theory&Research

GRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE MEASURES FOR PRACTITIONERS TO IDENTIFY SPLIT FAILURES

Detector occupancy is commonly used to measure traffic signal performance. Despite improvements in controller computational power, there have been relatively few innovations in occupancy-based performance measures or integration with other data. This thesis introduces and demonstrates the use of graphical performance measures based on detector occupancy ratios to verify potential split failures and other signal timing shortcomings reported to practitioners by the public. The proposed performance measures combine detector occupancy during the green interval, detector occupancy during the first five seconds of the red interval, and phase termination cause (gap out or force off). These are summarized by time of day to indicate whether the phase is undersaturated, nearly saturated, or oversaturated. These graphical performance measures and related quantitative summaries provide a first-level screening and triaging tool for practitioners to assess user concerns regarding whether sufficient green times are being provided to avoid split failures. In addition, they can provide insight about whether a split adjustment would be an appropriate course of action, and they can provide outcome-based feedback to staff after making split adjustments to determine whether operation improved or worsened. This thesis also includes two case studies that demonstrate how the performance measures can be used to identify phases experiencing several oversaturated splits and compare the number of oversaturated splits before and after reallocating green time to mitigate the oversaturation. Oversaturation was reduced at the intersection of US-31 and 126 th St. north of Indianapolis and at the intersection of River Rd. and the US-231 bypass of West Lafayette

For Richer or For Poorer? Evidence from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, and Venezuela

We analyze household income dynamics using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa (KwaZulu-Natal), Spain and Venezuela. In all four countries, households with the lowest reported base-year income experienced the largest absolute income gains. This result is robust to reasonable amounts of measurement error in two of the countries. In three of the four countries, households with the lowest predicted base-year income experienced gains at least as large as their wealthier counterparts. Thus, with one exception, the empirical importance of cumulative advantage, poverty traps, and skill-biased technical change was no greater than structural or macroeconomic changes that favored initially poor households in these four countries

An evaluation of the public relations program as it pertains to employee layoffs of a textile mill

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Income Mobility in Latin America

[Excerpt] In the last decades Latin American countries have experienced substantial macroeconomic instability. While the region as a whole experienced economic growth during most of the 1990’s and 2000’s, there were also years of stagnation as well as economic decline