Protection of Mutual Interests? Employment Protection and Skill Formation in Different Labour Market Regimes

■ The `varieties of capitalism' school argues that firm-specific skills are more common in coordinated than in liberal economies and that appropriate training is facilitated by employment protection legislation. We compare the level of firm-specific skills across 21 countries with different capacities for labour market coordination. The data provide very limited support for the thesis, showing large variation among the coordinated countries. The results indicate `varieties of coordination', which have different implications for the incidence and consequences of firm-specific skill. Improved operationalization of the skill concept seems urgent

Observing Unexpected Patterns in Cross-National Research: Blame Data, Theory, or Both? Attitudes toward Redistributive Taxation in Thirty-Three Countries

This article examines the relationships between socioeconomic status and attitudes toward redistributive taxation across 33 countries using the complete International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 data set. We apply a simple rational-choice-inspired homo-economicus hypothesis proposing that those better off in the socioeconomic hierarchy should have less reason to support state-organized economic redistribution compared to those situated at lower levels in the socioeconomic hierarchy. The empirical results demonstrate substantial cross-country variation regarding the correspondence between empirical observations and theoretical expectations. When faced with such tremendous cross-national variation in response patterns, a common strategy among researchers is to question the quality of the data collection procedures for those countries deviating strongly from theoretical expectations. The strategy chosen in this study is, however, different. The main argument is that an observed lack of fit between theory and empirical observations may be rooted in problems related to theory rather than the quality of data collection procedures. Building on previous research, two “cultural distance” hypotheses are formulated, both of which argue that the correspondence between the homo-economicus theory and empirics should indeed vary systematically across countries. The first focuses on the role of the welfare state and the second on the level of economic affluence and associated scientific dominance. Both hypotheses receive considerable empirical support. The relationship between socioeconomic status and support for redistributive taxation is substantially stronger in the wealthy Western welfare states - particularly among those of Northern Europe - than in the poor non-Western countries lacking any institutional design reminiscent of a welfare state

Additional services for Journal of Public Policy: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Institutional trust and welfare state support: on the role of trust in market institutions Insti

Abstract : The importance of institutional trust for structuring welfare state support (WSS) has been advanced by several scholars. Yet, the thesis has not received convincing empirical support. We argue that the weak evidence observed by previous research is caused by the failure of not extending the analytical framework beyond the study of public institutions. Using Sweden as a test case, our analytical framework covers trust in public institutions (TPI) and market institutions (TMI). The main findings are: (1) TMI has a robust negative effect on WSS; (2) the expected relationship between TPI and WSS is strengthened controlling for TMI; (3) TMI mediates the relationships between socio-economic variables and WSS. These findings underline the importance of bringing in other institutional configurations that are seen as conceivable alternatives to the state for administrating social welfare, not the least in studies primarily interested in the link between TPI and support for state-organised welfare

Swedish CLARIN activities

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2009 workshop Nordic Perspectives on the CLARIN Infrastructure of Language Resources. Editors: Rickard Domeij, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Steven Krauwer, Bente Maegaard, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Koenraad de Smedt. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 5 (2009), 1-5. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9207

Speech Synthesis Evaluation—State-of-the-Art Assessment and Suggestion for a Novel Research Program

Wagner P, Beskow J, Betz S, et al. Speech Synthesis Evaluation—State-of-the-Art Assessment and Suggestion for a Novel Research Program. In: Proceedings of the 10th Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW10). 2019.Speech synthesis applications have become an ubiquity, in navigation systems, digital assistants or as screen or audio book readers. Despite their impact on the acceptability of the systems in which they are embedded, and despite the fact that different applications probably need different types of TTS voices, TTS evaluation is still largely treated as an isolated problem. Even though there is strong agreement among researchers that the mainstream approaches to Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation are often insufficient and may even be misleading, there exist few clear-cut suggestions as to (1) how TTS evaluations may be realistically improved on a large scale, and (2) how such improvements may lead to an informed feedback for system developers and, ultimately, better systems relying on TTS. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in TTS evaluation, and suggests a novel user-centered research program for this area