The use of permanent contracts across Spanish regions: Do regional wage subsidies work?

This article evaluates the effectiveness of regional wage subsidies to foster permanent employment using information gathered from the “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales”. This dataset, which is used here for the first time as a source for evaluating Spanish labour market policy, offers a complete employment history for each individual, with no aggregation bias. The policy analyzed consists of a one-time subsidy offered by some Spanish regions for new permanent contracts signed for certain fixed-term employees and unemployed workers. Because our policy variable presents individual, regional and temporal variation, we apply a triple difference estimator to identify the average treatment effect of this policy. We conclude that the outflow into permanent employment of eligible workers improves only minimally under this policy. Nevertheless, the incidence is relatively greater for temporary workers than for unemployed ones and is also larger for younger and middle-aged female workers.Difference-in-difference-in-difference, Causal Evaluation Analysis, Regional Wage Subsidies

The use of permanent and temporary jobs across Spanish regions: Do unit labour cost differentials offer an explanation?

We study the use of permanent and temporary contracts across Spanish regions during the period 1995-2001. First we show that there are significant differences among the regional rates of permanent employment and that these differences tend to persist over time. To understand the underlying factors behind these observed differences we estimate a binary choice model for the individual probability of having a permanent contract, taking advantage of the panel data dimension of the Spanish Labour Force Survey. Our main results are that unit labour cost differentials, and thus labour productivity and total labour cost differentials, partially explain the divergence of regional permanent employment rates. Moreover, compared to the influence of regional fixed effects and other possible explanations such as sector specialisation or the presence of small firms in the region, unit labour costs explain more than two thirds of the observed variance in the permanent employment rate across Spanish regions, once all the relevant heterogeneity is taken into account.Temporary Employment, Unit Labour Costs, Random Effects, Spanish Regions.

Do wage subsidies affect the subsequent employment stability of permanent workers?: the case of Spain

This article studies how job creation subsidies designed for several Spanish regional governments to foster the creation of new permanent contracts during the period 1997-2004 might affect the subsequent employment stability of the eligible workers. We use a triple difference approach that focuses on regional and temporal variability in individual eligibility conditions of these subsidies to obtain the causal effect of the policy. Our data comes from the Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (MCVL) and from a database that contains information on the policy analyzed. Our main result is that workers who are eligible for these subsidies face a higher probability of exiting from their current permanent contract than those who do not. These effects vary by age and gender, as well as by contract duration and contract type. This result is particularly relevant for male workers whose contracts also benefited with nationally subsidized payroll deductions and for women with such deductions but only during their first year of employment. During that initial first-year period, the exit rate among eligible workers in our sample increased by 9%, 21% and 16% for younger, middle-aged and older female workers, respectively, and by about 13% and 25% for younger and older male workers, respectively.labour market rotation, permanent contracts, wage subsidies, triple difference, causal inference, average treatment effects, duration model.

On the truncation of the harmonic oscillator wavepacket

We present an interesting result regarding the implication of truncating the wavepacket of the harmonic oscillator. We show that disregarding the non-significant tails of a function which is the superposition of eigenfunctions of the harmonic oscillator has a remarkable consequence: namely, there exist infinitely many different superpositions giving rise to the same function on the interval. Uniqueness, in the case of a wavepacket, is restored by a postulate of quantum mechanics

Constructive approximations to the q=1/2 maximum entropy distribution from redundant and noisy data

An approach adopted to consider the problem of constructing the q=1/2 maximum entropy distribution from redundant and noisy data was discussed. The advantage of this generalized approach, when dealing with very noisy data was illustrated by a numerical simulation. A strategy was proposed that evolved through different steps such as independent constraints were first preselected by recourse to a data independent technique. A backward approach was also proposed for reducing the parameters of such distributions. It was found that the sub-optimal strategies could be utilized in a broad range of situations

An intrinsic Proper Generalized Decomposition for parametric symmetric elliptic problems

We introduce in this paper a technique for the reduced order approximation of parametric symmetric elliptic partial differential equations. For any given dimension, we prove the existence of an optimal subspace of at most that dimension which realizes the best approximation in mean of the error with respect to the parameter in the quadratic norm associated to the elliptic operator, between the exact solution and the Galerkin solution calculated on the subspace. This is analogous to the best approximation property of the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) subspaces, excepting that in our case the norm is parameter-depending, and then the POD optimal sub-spaces cannot be characterized by means of a spectral problem. We apply a deflation technique to build a series of approximating solutions on finite-dimensional optimal subspaces, directly in the on-line step. We prove that the partial sums converge to the continuous solutions, in mean quadratic elliptic norm.Comment: 18 page

ESM-1 siRNA Knockdown Decreased Migration and Expression of CXCL3 in Prostate Cancer Cells

Endothelial cell-specific molecule-1 (ESM-1), also known as endocan, is a soluble proteoglycan expressed by the vascular endothelium, which also circulates in the bloodstream. Inflammatory cytokines and proangiogenic growth factors increase its expression, and increased serum levels have been reported in several cancer types and immunocompetent patients with sepsis. The aim of this study was to analyze the expression profile of CXC-chemokines and the effects of ESM-1 gene knockdown in proliferation, migration and CXC-chemokine expression in highly metastatic human prostate PC-3 cells. Expression profiles of CXC-chemokines were analyzed in metastatic PC-3 and non-tumorigenic PWR-1E cells. siRNA-mediated knockdown of ESM-1 was performed into PC-3 cells, which were subsequently tested for cell migration and proliferation. Effect of siRNA transfection on CXC-chemokine expression was further quantified at the transcript and protein level. RT-qPCR analysis and sandwich ELISA assay revealed higher levels of ESM-1 and several CXC-chemokines in metastatic PC-3 cells compared to non-tumorigenic PWR-1E. Transfection of PC-3 cells with ESM-1-siRNA decreased cell migration with no effect on proliferation, and it was accompanied by decrease in the transcript and protein levels of the angiogenic chemokine CXCL3. We report here for the first time the ESM-1 targeting in PC-3 cells, which resulted in decreased migration, which may be related, at least in part, to decreased expression of the angiogenic CXCL3 chemokine, whose expression was found to be reduced in ESM-1-siRNA transfected cells. Additional studies are required to ascertain the biological role of ESM-1 in prostate cancer cells and the link with the expression of CXCL3

Cambio climático y política turística en España: diagnóstico del litoral mediterráneo español

El litoral mediterráneo español es una de las áreas de Europa donde pueden ser másevidentes los cambios en las condiciones climáticas durante las próximas décadas. Lasubida de temperaturas y el descenso de precipitaciones son factores que obligan a tomarmedidas de adaptación que reduzcan el disconfort térmico previsto y la escasez de recursosde agua convencional derivada de una disminución de las lluvias. La actividad turísticaes un sector vulnerable ante el cambio climático y sus riesgos asociados y ha de ir adaptándosea la nueva realidad climática prevista. Junto a los protocolos internacionales dereducción de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero, se han puesto en marcha planesde adaptación al cambio climático, con medidas concretas para cada sector económico.Se analizan las políticas de adaptación al cambio climático desarrolladas en España enlos últimos años, con especial detalle en las regiones del litoral mediterráneo, por la granimportancia económica y territorial de la actividad turística en ellas y los preocupantesefectos que se señalan en los modelos de cambio climático para las próximas décadas enestos territorios

On the Complexity of tt-Closeness Anonymization and Related Problems

An important issue in releasing individual data is to protect the sensitive information from being leaked and maliciously utilized. Famous privacy preserving principles that aim to ensure both data privacy and data integrity, such as $k$-anonymity and $l$-diversity, have been extensively studied both theoretically and empirically. Nonetheless, these widely-adopted principles are still insufficient to prevent attribute disclosure if the attacker has partial knowledge about the overall sensitive data distribution. The $t$-closeness principle has been proposed to fix this, which also has the benefit of supporting numerical sensitive attributes. However, in contrast to $k$-anonymity and $l$-diversity, the theoretical aspect of $t$-closeness has not been well investigated. We initiate the first systematic theoretical study on the $t$-closeness principle under the commonly-used attribute suppression model. We prove that for every constant $t$ such that $0\leq t<1$, it is NP-hard to find an optimal $t$-closeness generalization of a given table. The proof consists of several reductions each of which works for different values of $t$, which together cover the full range. To complement this negative result, we also provide exact and fixed-parameter algorithms. Finally, we answer some open questions regarding the complexity of $k$-anonymity and $l$-diversity left in the literature.Comment: An extended abstract to appear in DASFAA 201