The 2011 Industrial Relations Reform and Nominal Wage Adjustments in Greece

This study investigates nominal contractual base-wage adjustments in Greece associated with the 2011 industrial relations reform which re-defined the limits within which base wages could oscillate and allowed workers’ associations to negotiate for wages at the firm level. The assessment covers the period 2010-2013 and is based on information extracted from the universe of firm-level contracts signed in this period. We found that firm-level contracts increased dramatically shortly after the reform, now covering a larger pool of workers, especially in larger firms, and are associated with higher base-wage reductions in the post-reform period. At the firm level, wage reductions are higher when workers are represented by a workers’ association rather than a typical trade union. In addition, a heterogeneous effect is uncovered regarding the factors that shape base-wage adjustments (firm size, profitability, structure of bargaining body and aggregate unemployment) between new and traditional forms of workers’ representation in collective bargaining

Insight into the Greek electric sector and energy planning with mature technologies and fuel diversification

The numerous available options for the development of the Greek electric sector in combination with the various techno-economic and political constraints make energy planning rather complex. Furthermore, as full auctioning of CO 2 allowances shall be the rule from 2013 onwards for the electric sector following free allocation, even more uncertainties emerge. This work aims at investigating the main characteristics of the Greek electric system taking into consideration the various allowance allocation schemes, evaluates fundamental energy scenarios and ultimately performs energy planning. The reliability of the algorithm utilised is assessed by predicting successfully key figure energy results for years 2004-2008. Main parameter under investigation in the study is the cost of CO 2 emissions allowances, while expansion scenarios are evaluated according to a newly developed set of indices standing for feasibility, environmental performance, cost effectiveness and energy safety. Many expansion scenarios examined were proved unrealistic as led to extremely high utilization of imported fuels for electricity production, while others proved inefficient on environmental or economic basis. Finally, it was proved that if a "conservative" energy planning is adopted, emissions reduction in 2020 can reach 6.3% over 2005

InP DHBT Single-Stage and Multiplicative Distributed Amplifiers for Ultra-Wideband Amplification

This paper highlights the gain-bandwidth merit of the single stage distributed amplifier (SSDA) and its derivative multiplicative amplifier topologies (i.e. the cascaded SSDA (C-SSDA) and the matrix SSDA (M-SSDA)), for ultra-wideband amplification. Two new monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) amplifiers are presented: an SSDA MMIC with 7.1dB average gain and 200GHz bandwidth; and the world's first M-SSDA, which has a 12dB average gain and 170GHz bandwidth. Both amplifiers are based on an Indium Phosphide DHBT process with 250nm emitter width. To the authors best knowledge, the SSDA has the widest bandwidth for any single stage amplifier reported to date. Furthermore, the three tier M-SSDA has the highest bandwidth and gain-bandwidth product for any matrix amplifier reported to date

Industrial Relations Reform, Firm-Level Bargaining and Nominal Wage Floors

We investigate the impact of the 2011 industrial relations reform in Greece that made firms with less than 50 employees eligible to participate to firm-level bargaining. Matching administrative contractual data with longitudinal firm-level data we identify firms affected and not affected by the reform. We find that during the first post-reform year, affected firms with less than 50 employees experienced a 4.8 per cent increase in the probability of firm-level contracting and a 12 per cent drop in wage floors relative to not affected firms. We also report estimates regarding the post-reform employment effect of firm-level bargaining

A New Lower Bound for Deterministic Truthful Scheduling

We study the problem of truthfully scheduling $m$ tasks to $n$ selfish unrelated machines, under the objective of makespan minimization, as was introduced in the seminal work of Nisan and Ronen [STOC'99]. Closing the current gap of $[2.618,n]$ on the approximation ratio of deterministic truthful mechanisms is a notorious open problem in the field of algorithmic mechanism design. We provide the first such improvement in more than a decade, since the lower bounds of $2.414$ (for $n=3$) and $2.618$ (for $n\to\infty$) by Christodoulou et al. [SODA'07] and Koutsoupias and Vidali [MFCS'07], respectively. More specifically, we show that the currently best lower bound of $2.618$ can be achieved even for just $n=4$ machines; for $n=5$ we already get the first improvement, namely $2.711$; and allowing the number of machines to grow arbitrarily large we can get a lower bound of $2.755$.Comment: 15 page

Transimpedance amplifiers with 133 GHz bandwidth on 130 nm indium phosphide double heterojunction bipolar transistors

In this work, the authors present two transimpedance amplifier (TIA) circuits designed for fibre optical interconnect systems. They compare a common base (CB) topology with a common emitter (CE) shunt-shunt feedback topology in terms of frequency response, power consumption, noise, and input impedance. The two TIAs are designed on a 130 nm indium phosphide double heterojunction bipolar transistor technology from Teledyne Scientific Company (TSC) with an ft/fmax of 520 GHz/1.15 THz and are measured in the frequency and time domains. They exhibit a transimpedance gain of 42 dBΩ with a 133 GHz bandwidth, the highest bandwidth reported in the literature and power consumption of 32.3 mW for the CB and 25.5 mW for the CE. Eye diagram measurements were conducted up to 64 Gbps and input referred noise density was measured at 30.2 pA/√Hz for the CB and 13.9 pA/√Hz for the CE

The short-term impact of the 2020 pandemic lockdown on employment in Greece

This paper analyzes the short-term employment impact of the COVID-19 lockdown in Greece during the first few months following the pandemic onset. During the initial lockdown period, aggregate employment was lower by almost 9 percentage points than it would have been expected based on pre-pandemic employment trends. However, due to a government intervention that prohibited layoffs, this was not due to higher separation rates. The overall short-term employment impact was due to lower hiring rates. To uncover the mechanism behind this, we use a difference-in-differences framework, and show that tourism-related activities, which are exposed to seasonal variation, had significantly lower employment entry rates in the months following the pandemic onset compared to non-tourism activities. Our results highlight the relevance of the timing of unanticipated shocks in economies with strong seasonal patterns, and the relative effectiveness of policy interventions to partly absorb the consequences of such shocks

Compression of volume-surface integral equation matrices via Tucker decomposition for magnetic resonance applications

In this work, we propose a method for the compression of the coupling matrix in volume\hyp surface integral equation (VSIE) formulations. VSIE methods are used for electromagnetic analysis in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) applications, for which the coupling matrix models the interactions between the coil and the body. We showed that these effects can be represented as independent interactions between remote elements in 3D tensor formats, and subsequently decomposed with the Tucker model. Our method can work in tandem with the adaptive cross approximation technique to provide fast solutions of VSIE problems. We demonstrated that our compression approaches can enable the use of VSIE matrices of prohibitive memory requirements, by allowing the effective use of modern graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the arising matrix\hyp vector products. This is critical to enable numerical MRI simulations at clinical voxel resolutions in a feasible computation time. In this paper, we demonstrate that the VSIE matrix\hyp vector products needed to calculate the electromagnetic field produced by an MRI coil inside a numerical body model with $1$ mm$^3$ voxel resolution, could be performed in $\sim 33$ seconds in a GPU, after compressing the associated coupling matrix from $\sim 80$ TB to $\sim 43$ MB.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure