Caravaggism : Madrid, London, Dublin and Edinburgh

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Book review of Natasha T. Seaman: "The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen. Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht." Ashgate, Farnham, 2012.

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Partner Pay Gap – Associations between Spouses’ Relative Earnings and Life Satisfaction among Couples in the UK. ESRI WP642, November 2019

Despite women’s recent gains in education and employment, husbands still tend to out-earn their wives. This article examines the relationship between the partner pay gap, i.e. the difference in earned income between married, co-resident partners, and life satisfaction. Contrary to previous studies, we investigate the effects of recent changes in relative earnings within couples as well as labour market transitions. Using several waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we reveal that men exhibit an increase in life satisfaction in response to a recent increase in their proportional earnings. For women their proportional earnings had no effect on life satisfaction in one model, and in a model that accounted for their recent employment changes, women exhibited decreased life satisfaction. We also find secondary-earning husbands report lower average life satisfaction than primary-earning men, while such differences were not found for women. The analysis offers compelling evidence of the role of gendered norms in the sustenance of the partner pay gap

Modifying Faug\`ere's F5 Algorithm to ensure termination

The structure of the F5 algorithm to compute Gr\"obner bases makes it very efficient. However, while it is believed to terminate for so-called regular sequences, it is not clear whether it terminates for all inputs. This paper has two major parts. In the first part, we describe in detail the difficulties related to a proof of termination. In the second part, we explore three variants that ensure termination. Two of these have appeared previously only in dissertations, and ensure termination by checking for a Gr\"obner basis using traditional criteria. The third variant, F5+, identifies a degree bound using a distinction between "necessary" and "redundant" critical pairs that follows from the analysis in the first part. Experimental evidence suggests this third approach is the most efficient of the three.Comment: 19 pages, 1 tabl

Women between Part-Time and Full-Time Work: The Influence of Changing Hours of Work on Happiness and Life-Satisfaction

This paper asks whether part-time work makes women happy. Previous research on labour supply has assumed that as workers freely choose their optimal working hours on the basis of their innate preferences and the hourly wage rate, outcome reflects preference. This paper tests this assumption by measuring the impact of changes in working-hours on life satisfaction in two countries (the UK and Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey). We find decreases in working-hours bring about positive and significant improvement on well-being for women.Temporary Employment, Unemployment, Health

Evaluating State Programmes - “Natural Experiments” and Propensity Scores

Evaluations of programmes — for example, labour market interventions such as employment schemes and training courses — usually involve comparison of the performance of a treatment group (recipients of the programme) with a control group (non-recipients) as regards some response (gaining employment, for example). But the ideal of randomisation of individuals to groups is rarely possible in the social sciences and there may be substantial differences between groups in the distributions of individual characteristics that can affect response. Past practice in economics has been to try to use multiple regression models to adjust away the differences in observed characteristics, while also testing for sample selection bias. The Propensity Score approach, which is widely applied in epidemiology and related fields, focuses on the idea that “matching” individuals in the groups should be compared. The appropriate matching measure is usually taken to be the prior probability of programme participation. This paper describes the key ideas of the Propensity Score method and illustrates its application by reanalysis of some Irish data on training courses.

Constraints or Preferences? Identifying Answers from Part-time Workers’ Transitions in Denmark, France and the United-Kingdom

This article investigates whether women work part-time through preference or constraint and argues that different countries provide different opportunities for preference attainment. It argues that women with family responsibilities are unlikely to have their working preferences met without national policies supportive of maternal employment. Using event history analysis the article tracks part-time workers' transitions to both full-time employment and to labour market drop-out.The article compares the outcome of workers in the UK, a country with little support for maternal employment, relative to Denmark and France, two countries with a long history of facilitating workers' engagement in both paid employment and family life. It finds evidence of part-time constraint in the UK relative to the other two countries

Bridge or trap? To what extent do temporary workers make more transitions to unemployment than to the standard employment contract

This article analyses the transitions of temporary workers to the standard employment contract and to unemployment. Adopting a comparative framework in an attempt to identify whether labour market institutions parameterize outcomes, four countries with different forms of market structuration are analysed: France, West Germany, Denmark, and the UK. Using the European Community Household Panel survey (ECHP), spanning a period from 1995 to 2001, temporary workers’ transitions are investigated using event history analysis techniques. This article establishes higher rates of transition to permanent employment than to unemployment for most temporary workers, though strong between-country differences are found

Are fixed-term jobs bad for your health? : a comparison of West-Germany and Spain

"In this paper we analyse the health effects of fixed-term contract status for men and women in West-Germany and Spain using panel data. This paper asks whether changes in the employment relationship, as a result of the liberalisation of employment law, have altered the positive health effects associated with employment (Goldsmith et al. 1996; Jahoda 1982). Using information on switches between unemployment and employment by contract type we analyze whether transitions to different contracts have different health effects. We find that unemployed workers show positive health effects at job acquisition, and also find the positive effect to be smaller for workers who obtain a fixed-term job. We also establish surprising differences by gender and country, with women less likely to report positive health effects at job acquisition. For West-Germany, this was found to be a function of the dual-burden of paid and unpaid care within the home." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))befristeter Arbeitsvertrag - Auswirkungen, Gesundheitszustand - internationaler Vergleich, Arbeitnehmer, geschlechtsspezifische Faktoren, Arbeitslose, Sozioökonomisches Panel, Europäisches Haushaltspanel, psychische Faktoren, Unsicherheit, Westdeutschland, Spanien, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Beyond Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action: Should Strict Products Liability Be the Next Frontier for Water Contamination Lawsuits?

This Article explores the yet unexplored—the viability of strict products liability against sellers of contaminated water. Part I sets the factual context for the Article, briefly describing the nature and scope of this nation’s groundwater contamination problem, and explains why, though historically ignored, strict products liability may figure prominently in current and future water contamination litigation. Part II sets the legal context for the Article, very briefly outlining the evolution of strict products liability from its birth in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc., through its maturation as urged in the recent Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability (hereafter Restatement Third). Part III then analyzes whether each of the necessary elements of a strict products liability cause of action is sufficiently satisfied to warrant its application to the sale of contaminated water. Part III concludes that contaminated water is properly characterized as a manufacturing defect and thus subjects the seller of the water to strict liability. Part IV traces the historical public policy foundations for imposing strict liability and explores whether its application to the sale of contaminated water furthers or undermines the interests sought to be advanced or protected by strict products liability. Part V then highlights the critical importance of quality control as a pivotal public policy factor in strict products liability. While the absence of quality control as a public policy factor in the design and warning defect context has allowed a return to a negligence-based liability scheme, quality control remains central to the continued application of strict liability in the manufacturing defect context. Part V then illustrates the importance of quality control through a series of graphs depicting the impact of quality control decisions on the number of expected manufacturing defects and their consequential costs. Part V also explains that the almost uniformly-recognized unfairness of imposing strict liability on manufacturers of products containing unforeseeable defects in the design and warning defect contexts also exists in the manufacturing defect context in numerous instances. To remedy that unfairness, Part VI proposes a new affirmative defense to manufacturing defect liability applicable when there is an unforeseeable defect in the product that is not reasonably traceable to the quality control levels set by the manufacturer. Finally, Part VI illustrates the application of the proposed quality control affirmative defense by applying the defense to the facts of A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich