Efficiency Wage and Labor Discipline Models: Matched-Panel Evidence from Brazilian Construction Industry

The aim of this paper is to test the relationship between wage and workers’ labor effort for the Brazilian construction industry. This relationship is stated by both the shirking and the labor discipline versions of efficiency wage models. Actually workers’ labor effort is neither verifiable nor available for empirical tests, so the most of the empirical tests for this theory are performed by testing the trade-off between wages and supervision, and the trade-off between wages and the workers’ probability of termination. This paper provides empirical tests for both relationships, and the efficiency wage model hypothesis is empirically supported by this paper.Efficiency Wage Models, Cross-sectional Models, Panel Data Models, Matched Employer-Employee Data

A Note on Gibrat's Law, Gibrat''s Legacy and Firm Growth: Evidence from Brazilian Companies

The aim of this work is to test the Gibrat's Law hypothesis for Brazilian firms. Gibrat''s Law establishes that firm growth is a random walk, it means that the probability of a given proportionale change in size during a specified period is the same for all firms in a given industry. This work uses information from manufacturing and services sectors, and it uses two different variables to compute firm growth: The growth of employment and the growth of value added. Gibrat''s Law was rejected for the complete sample of manufacturing and services firms - the smaller companies grow at larger rates. On the other hand, Gibrat''s Law is supported in both sectors when a subsample of large and well-established companies is used (Gibrat''s Legacy). These results corroborate the recent stylized facts of the literature.Firm Growth

Risk of Firm Closure and Wages in Brazil: Compensating Wage Dierentials or Bargaining Concessions?

The economic theory proposes two hypotheses for the relationship between wages and risk of job loss due to rm (or plant) closure. The rst hypothesis posits that workers at greater risk should be compensated by higher wages. This is known as the theory of compensating wage diferentials. The second hypothesis states that workers at rms with a greater risk of closure would be willing to exchange higher wages for longer-term stability in the job. This is known as the theory of bargaining concessions. There is a paucity of empirical studies on this issue, and the results have been inconsistent. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence for the Brazilian manufacturing industry. To accomplish that, diferent risk measures, diferent databases, and dierent econometric methods are used. All the tests performed in this study conrm the theory of compensating wage diferentials.exit; bankruptcy; severance payments; insolvency; wage determination

Conditions for Equality between Lyapunov and Morse Decompositions

Let $Q\rightarrow X$ be a continuous principal bundle whose group $G$ is reductive. A flow $\phi$ of automorphisms of $Q$ endowed with an ergodic probability measure on the compact base space $X$ induces two decompositions of the flag bundles associated to $Q$. A continuous one given by the finest Morse decomposition and a measurable one furnished by the Multiplicative Ergodic Theorem. The second is contained in the first. In this paper we find necessary and sufficient conditions so that they coincide. The equality between the two decompositions implies continuity of the Lyapunov spectra under pertubations leaving unchanged the flow on the base space

A probability distribution for quantum tunneling times

We propose a general expression for the probability distribution of real-valued tunneling times of a localized particle, as measured by the Salecker-Wigner-Peres quantum clock. This general expression is used to obtain the distribution of times for the scattering of a particle through a static rectangular barrier and for the tunneling decay of an initially bound state after the sudden deformation of the potential, the latter case being relevant to understand tunneling times in recent attosecond experiments involving strong field ionization.Comment: 14 pages, 8 Figure

A Theory of the Casimir Effect for Compact Regions

We develop a mathematically precise framework for the Casimir effect. Our working hypothesis, verified in the case of parallel plates, is that only the regularization-independent Ramanujan sum of a given asymptotic series contributes to the Casimir pressure. As an illustration, we treat two cases: parallel plates, identifying a previous cutoff free version (by G. Scharf and W. W.) as a special case, and the sphere.We finally discuss the open problem of the Casimir force for the cube. We propose an Ansatz for the exterior force and argue why it may provide the exact solution, as well as an explanation of the repulsive sign of the force.Comment: version published, 23 page