U.S. Unemployment Duration: Has Long Become Longer or Short Become Shorter?

The U.S. labor market has been experiencing unprecedented high average unemployment duration. The shift in the unemployment duration distribution can be traced back to the early nineties. In this study, censored quantile regression methods are employed to analyze the changes in the US unemployment duration distribution. We explore the decomposition method proposed by Machado and Mata (2005) to disentangle the contribution of the changes generated by the covariate distribution and by the conditional distribution. The data used in this inquiry are taken from the nationally representative Displaced Worker Surveys of 1988 and 1998. We provide evidence that the change in the unemployment duration distribution is mainly produced by the opposing effects of a sharp rise in job-to-job transition rates and an increased sensitivity of unemployment duration to unemployment rates. Compositional changes in the labor force played a limited role. We rationalize our findings by arguing that improved screening technology is likely to be the relevant underlying mechanism at work.

The poverty reduction strategy of the government of Brazil: a rapid appraisal

This paper provides an overview of both the current structure of poverty in Brazil through a detailed poverty profile and of the aggregate dynamics of poverty in the last two decades. We then assess a number of government policies and programs which are either specifically designed to reduce poverty or have a direct bearing on current or future social welfare. A brief discussion of the Comunidade Solidária Programme is followed by an analysis of the coverage and targeting performance of mainstream programs in the areas of education, health, social security and other transfers. Our main findings are that a fifth of the Brazilian population live in indigence, and that this does not represent a substantial improvement over the situation two decades ago. A share of the blame for this must be borne by the highly regressive pattern of incidence of ‘social expenditures’ which are, on the whole, disproportionately appropriated by the middle-classes and the rich.

Transparent Replication Using Metaprogramming in Cyan

Replication can be used to increase the availability of a service by creating many operational copies of its data called replicas. Active replication is a form of replication that has strong consistency semantics, easier to reason about and program. However, creating replicated services using active replication still demands from the programmer the knowledge of subtleties of the replication mechanism. In this paper we show how to use the metaprogramming infrastructure of the Cyan language to shield the application programmer from these details, allowing easier creation of fault-tolerant replicated applications through simple annotations.Comment: 8 page

Protecting Intellectual Proprietary Rights through Secure Interactive Contract Negotiation

Protection of Intellectual Proprietary Rights is currently one of the most important barriers to electronic commerce of digital contents over networks. Authors and content providers understand the immense advantages of the digital world but show some reserve. However, technologies and techniques to protect IPR in digital content exist, their deployment in a coherent way is still in an early stage. In this paper, we describe the approach followed by the OCTALIS Project towards and effective electronic commerce of digital images. After describing briefly enabling technologies, the emphasis is on contract negotiation over Internet through a secure dialog between the Service Provider and the User

Contributos do 1.º ciclo do ensino básico para a promoção da saúde oral em Portugal : uma primeira análise dos manuais escolares (1990-2010)

Esta proposta tem como principal objectivo verificar e reflectir sobre a forma como os manuais escolares abordam a Saúde Oral ao longo do 1.º CEB entre 1990-2010. Este estudo, apoia-se numa abordagem metodológica assente na análise de conteúdo pelo estabelecimento de categorias a posteriori, e na análise de clusters, pela elaboração de dendogramas. Até ao momento os resultados mostram que as categorias de análise são comuns à maioria dos manuais que compõem a nossa amostra.Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança da Universidade do Minho (CIEC) - UI 317 da Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Recovery of metals from MSW fly ash by leaching and liquid-liquid extraction

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Química. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto, Chalmers University of Technology. 200