High Wages - An instrument inducing workers to work more?

Wages and their effect on labour supply are not only an important subject for labour economists who aim at measuring substitution and income effects. Additionally, the government is interested in the impact of policy changes on the labour market and companies would like to know if it is possible to increase labour supply and especially productivity by increasing the wage rate. This paper introduces a dynamic version of the traditional model of labour supply and presents model extensions and the underlying behavioural assumptions arising from empirical findings, psychology and neuroscience. It evaluates findings and behavioural assumptions derived so far. None of the contributions investigated in this work is entirely free from criticism. The problem of analysing a comprehensive model of labour supply on the one hand, is the scarcity of suitable subjects to investigate and on the other hand, the individuality of each subject observed. With this work a critical analysis of existing research on labour supply decisions is provided. This shall contribute to motivate and ease future research in this area which has to take these problems into account.high wages; analysis; labour supply decision; labour supply model; intertemporal labour supply

Oddness from Rigidness

We revisit the problem of constructing type IIA orientifolds on T^6/(Z2 x Z2) which admit (non)-factorisable lattices. More concretely, we consider a (Z2 x Z2') orientifold with torsion, where D6-branes wrap rigid 3-cycles. We derive the model building rules and consistency conditions in the case where the compactification lattice is non-factorisable. We show that in this class of configurations, (semi) realistic models with an odd number of families can be easily constructed, in contrast to compactifications where the D6-branes wrap non-rigid cycles. We also show that an odd number of families can be obtained in the factorisable case, without the need of tilted tori. We illustrate the discussion by presenting three family Pati-Salam models with no chiral exotics in both factorisable and non-factorisable toroidal compactifications.Comment: 20 page

Worldsheet instantons and coupling selection rules in heterotic orbifolds

We review recent results on string coupling selection rules for heterotic orbifolds, derived using conformal field theory. Such rules are the first step towards understanding the viability of the recently obtained compactifications with potentially realistic particle spectra. They arise from the properties of the worldsheet instantons that mediate the couplings, and include stringy effects that would seem 'miraculous' to an effective field theory observer.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at SQS'13, JINR, Dubna, Russia, 29 July - 03 August, 201

Orientifold's Landscape: Non-Factorisable Six-Tori

We construct type IIA orientifolds on T6/(Z2 x Z2) which admit non factorisable lattices. We describe a method to deal with this kind of configurations and discuss how the compactification lattice affects the tadpole cancellation conditions. Moreover, we include D6-branes which are not parallel to O6-planes. These branes can give rise to chiral spectra in four dimensions, thus uncovering a new corner in the landscape of intersecting D-brane model constructions. We demonstrate the construction at an explicit example. In general we argue that obtaining an odd number of families is problematic.Comment: 24 pages, one figure, v2: references added, v3: small proof added in footnote 5, minor changes, to appear in JHE