Returns to Human Capital under the Communist Wage Grid and During the Transition to a Market Economy

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it is a leading transition economy in which the communist grid remained intact until the very end of the communist regime. We demonstrate that for decades the communist wage grid maintained extremely low rate of return on education, but that the return increased dramatically and equally in all ownership categories of firms during the transition. Our estimates also indicate that men's wage-experience profile was concave in both regimes and on average it did not change from the communist to the transition period. However, the de novo private firms display a more concave profile than SOEs and public administration. Contrary to earlier studies, we show that men's inter-industry wage structure changed substantially between 1989 and 1996.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39656/3/wp272.pd

Recombination activity of iron-gallium and iron-indium pairs in silicon

The recombination activity of iron-gallium (FeGa) and iron-indium (FeIn) pairs in crystalline silicon is studied by means of injection-dependent carrier lifetime measurements on Fe-implanted, Ga- and In-doped p-type silicon wafers of different resistivities (0.3–15Ωcm). Compared to FeB pairs, FeGa and FeIn pairs are found to be much more effective recombination centers in p-type silicon. Using Shockley–Read–Hall statistics we determine the energy level Et of the FeGa-related center to be 0.20eV above the valence-band edge Eν. The strong recombination activity of FeGa is assigned to its large electron-capture cross section σn of 4×10⁻¹⁴cm². The hole-capture cross section σp is 2×10⁻¹⁴cm². For the FeIn-related recombination center, our measurements show that Et=Eν+0.15eV, σn=3.5×10⁻¹³cm², and σp=1.5×10⁻¹⁴cm². Strong illumination with white light is found to dissociate both types of pairs. Storage of the samples in the dark leads to a full repairing of FeGa and FeIn pairs. Lifetime changes measured before and after illumination can be used to determine the interstitialiron concentration in Ga- and In-doped silicon using calibration factors determined from the measured defect parameters.J.S. thanks A. Cuevas and A. Blakers for their hospitality during his research stay at ANU and acknowledges the financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. D.M. acknowledges the financial support of the Australian Research Council

Long-time behavior of a finite volume discretization for a fourth order diffusion equation

We consider a non-standard finite-volume discretization of a strongly non-linear fourth order diffusion equation on the $d$-dimensional cube, for arbitrary $d \geq 1$. The scheme preserves two important structural properties of the equation: the first is the interpretation as a gradient flow in a mass transportation metric, and the second is an intimate relation to a linear Fokker-Planck equation. Thanks to these structural properties, the scheme possesses two discrete Lyapunov functionals. These functionals approximate the entropy and the Fisher information, respectively, and their dissipation rates converge to the optimal ones in the discrete-to-continuous limit. Using the dissipation, we derive estimates on the long-time asymptotics of the discrete solutions. Finally, we present results from numerical experiments which indicate that our discretization is able to capture significant features of the complex original dynamics, even with a rather coarse spatial resolution.Comment: 27 pages, minor change

Returns to Human Capital under the Communist Wage Grid and During the Transition to a Market Economy

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it is a leading transition economy in which the communist grid remained intact until the very end of the communist regime. We demonstrate that for decades the communist wage grid maintained extremely low rate of return on education, but that the return increased dramatically and equally in all ownership categories of firms during the transition. Our estimates also indicate that men's wage-experience profile was concave in both regimes and on average it did not change from the communist to the transition period. However, the de novo private firms display a more concave profile than SOEs and public administration. Contrary to earlier studies, we show that men's inter-industry wage structure changed substantially between 1989 and 1996.