The Theory of Human Capital Revisited: On the Interaction of General and Specific Investments

Human capital theory distinguishes between training in general-usage and firm-specific skills. In his seminal work, Becker (1964) argues that employers will not be willing to invest in general training when labor markets are competitive. However, they are willing to invest in specific training because it cannot be transferred to outside firms. The paper reconsiders Becker’s theory. We show that there exists an incentive complementarity between employersponsored general and specific investments: the possibility to provide specific training leads the employer to invest in general human capital. Conversely, the latter reduces the hold-up problem that arises with respect to the provision of firm-specific training. We also consider the virtues of long-term contracting and discuss some empirical observations that could be explained by the model.human capital formation, general and specific training, hold-up problem.

Democracy Versus the National Security State

The Single Chip Cloud computer (SCC) is an experimental processor from Intel Labs with 48 cores connected with a 2D mesh on-chip network. We evaluate the performance of SCC regarding off-chip memory accesses and communication capabilities. As benchmark, we use the merging phase of mergesort, a representative of a memory access intensive algorithm. Mergesort is parallelized and adapted in 4 variants, each leveraging different features of the SCC, in order to assess and compare their performance impact. Our results motivate to consider on-chip pipelined mergesort on SCC, which is an issue of ongoing work

TEST: A Tropic, Embodied, and Situated Theory of Cognition

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent’s ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent’s bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence while we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage vs. online generation as well as on representation-specific properties

Redistribution, Fiscal Competition, and the Politics of Economic Integration

The paper examines the redistributive consequences of the economic integration of factor markets. We consider two countries that redistribute income among their residents. The social benefits in each country are financed by a source based tax on capital which is democratically chosen by its inhabitants. If either capital or labour is internationally mobile, the countries engage in fiscal competiton, i.e., the partial integration of capital or labour markets is detrimental to the countries' redistributive ability. A move from partial to full integration, however, may alleviate rather than intensify fiscal competition, particularly, if the two countries face sufficiently similar economic and political conditions. In such a situation, increased integration of labour markets will soften the incentives compete for mobile capital. As a result, there is more redistribution in equilibrium and a majority of the population in each country is strictly better off.

Federations, Constitutions, and Political Bargaining

The paper studies a world where a region provides essential inputs for the successful implementation of a local public policy project with spill-overs, and where bargaining between different levels of government may ensure efficient decision making ex post. We ask whether the authority over the public policy measure should rest with the local government or be centralized, allowing financial relationships within the federation to be designed optimally. We show that centralization is always dominant when governments are benevolent, and that both governance structures are otherwise inefficient as long as political bargaining is disregarded. With bargaining, however, the first best can often be achieved under decentralization, but not under centralization. At the root of the result is the alignment of decision making over both essential inputs and final project size under decentralization.Federalism, Constitutions, Decentralization, Grants, Political Bargaining.

Influence of Concrete Moisture Condition on Half-Cell Potential Measurement

The detection of on-going corrosion is one of the main issues during inspection of reinforced concrete structures. The half-cell potential measurement method is the most common and established non-destructive technique to support this task. But a lot of infrastructures are exposed to rain or seawater, which can cause heterogeneous moisture condition within one component. In turn, this can have influence on the potential mapping results, and as a consequence, the interpretability of the half-cell potential measurement is impaired. This paper focuses on the influence of concrete moisture condition on half-cell potential measurement. Laboratory and practical tests’ results are analyzed qualitatively with varying moisture conditions due to natural exposure as well as with different prewetting conditions. On the basis of these results, recommendations are made how to evaluate half-cell potential mapping results. If large structures are inspected by half-cell potential measurements, it is advantageous to compare only these parts, which are in a comparable moisture condition by subdivision of the structure

The Theory of Human Capital Revisited: On the Interaction of General and Specific Investments

Human capital theory distinguishes between training in general-usage and firm-specific skills. In his seminal work, Becker (1964) argues that employers will not be willing to invest in general training when labor markets are competitive. However, they are willing to invest in specific training because it cannot be transferred to outside firms. The paper reconsiders Becker's theory. We show that there exists an incentive complementarity between employersponsored general and specific investments: the possibility to provide specific training leads the employer to invest in general human capital. Conversely, the latter reduces the hold-up problem that arises with respect to the provision of firm-specific training. We also consider the virtues of long-term contracting and discuss some empirical observations that could be explained by the model

10191 Abstracts Collection -- Program Composition and Optimization : Autotuning, Scheduling, Metaprogramming and Beyond

From May 9 to 12, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10191 ``Program Composition and Optimization: Autotuning, Scheduling, Metaprogramming and Beyond\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available