Cohort Size and Youth Earnings: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

In this paper, I use data from the Canadian Labour Force Surveys (LFS), and the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses to estimate the impact of an important labor supply shock on the earnings of young high-school graduates. The abolition of Ontario’s Grade 13 generated a ‘double’ cohort of high-school graduates that simultaneously entered the Ontario labor market, generating a large and sudden increase in the labor supply. This provides a rare occasion to measure the impact of cohort size on earnings without the supply shock being possibly confounded with unobserved trends—a recurring problem in the literature. The Census findings suggest that the effect of the supply shock is statistically and economically important, depressing weekly earnings by 5 to 9 percent. The findings from Census are supported by the LFS results which suggest that the immediate impact of the supply shock—measured about six months after high-school graduation—is also important.Labor Supply Shock, Youth

Estimating the BenefiÂ…t of High School for College-Bound Students

Studies based on instrumental variable techniques suggest that the value of a high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the size of the benefi…t for students who will go on to post-secondary education. To help …fill this gap, I measure the value-added of a year of high-school mathematics for university-bound students using a recent Ontario secondary school reform. The subject speci…ficity of this reform makes it possible to identify the benefi…t of an extra year of mathematics despite the presence of self-selection: one can use subjects unaffected by the reform to control for potential ability differences between control and treatment groups. Further, the richness of the data allows me to generalize the standard difference-in-differences estimator, correcting for heterogeneity in ability measurement across subjects. The estimated value- added to an extra year of mathematics is small for these students –of the order of 17 percent of a standard deviation in university grades. This evidence helps to explain why the literature fi…nds only modest effects of taking more mathematics in high school on wages, the small monetary gain being due to a lack of subject-speci…c human capital accumulation. Within- and between-sample comparisons also suggest that the extra year of mathematics benefi…ts lower-ability students more than higher-ability students.Human Capital, High School Curriculum, Education Reform, Mathematics, Factor Model

Relative Facial Action Unit Detection

This paper presents a subject-independent facial action unit (AU) detection method by introducing the concept of relative AU detection, for scenarios where the neutral face is not provided. We propose a new classification objective function which analyzes the temporal neighborhood of the current frame to decide if the expression recently increased, decreased or showed no change. This approach is a significant change from the conventional absolute method which decides about AU classification using the current frame, without an explicit comparison with its neighboring frames. Our proposed method improves robustness to individual differences such as face scale and shape, age-related wrinkles, and transitions among expressions (e.g., lower intensity of expressions). Our experiments on three publicly available datasets (Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+), Bosphorus, and DISFA databases) show significant improvement of our approach over conventional absolute techniques. Keywords: facial action coding system (FACS); relative facial action unit detection; temporal information;Comment: Accepted at IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, Steamboat Springs Colorado, USA, 201

The Control of Dynamical Systems - Recovering Order from Chaos -

Following a brief historical introduction of the notions of chaos in dynamical systems, we will present recent developments that attempt to profit from the rich structure and complexity of the chaotic dynamics. In particular, we will demonstrate the ability to control chaos in realistic complex environments. Several applications will serve to illustrate the theory and to highlight its advantages and weaknesses. The presentation will end with a survey of possible generalizations and extensions of the basic formalism as well as a discussion of applications outside the field of the physical sciences. Future research avenues in this rapidly growing field will also be addressed.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures. Invited Talk at the XXIth International Conference on the Physics of Electronic and Atomic Collisions (ICPEAC), July 22-27, 1999 (Sendai, Japan

Efficiency and Distributional Impacts of Tradable White Certificates Compared to Taxes, Subsidies and Regulations

Tradable White Certificates (TWC) schemes, also labelled Energy-Efficiency Certificates schemes, were recently implemented in Great Britain, Italy and France. Energy suppliers have to fund a given quantity of energy efficiency measures, or to buy so-called "white certificates" from other suppliers who exceed their target. We develop a partial equilibrium model to compare TWC schemes to other policy instruments for energy efficiency, i.e., energy taxes, subsidies on energy-saving goods and regulations fixing a minimum level of energy-efficiency. The model features an endogenous level of energy service and we analyse the influence of the substitutability between energy and energy-saving goods to produce the energy service, as well as the influence of the elasticity of demand for the energy service. We show that if the level of energy service consumption is fixed, a TWC scheme is as efficient as an energy tax, but that it is much less otherwise because it does not provide the optimal incentive to reduce the consumption of energy service. This inefficiency is worsened if energy suppliers' targets are fixed rather than proportional to the suppliers' current output. On the other hand, compared to taxes, a TWC scheme allows reaching a given level of energy savings with a lower increase in the consumers' energy price, which may ease its implementation.Energy Saving Policies, Energy-Efficiency Certificates, White Certificates, Rebound Effect

Union Membership and Perceived Job Insecurity: 30 Years of Evidence from the American General social Survey

Using the Amercian General Social Survey, we explore the link between union membership and perceived job insecurity. This finding is mainly atributed to the primary and secondary sectors and for recessionary periods. Instrumental-variables estimation and the use of attitudinal proxy variables suggest that the positive correlation union membership and perceived job insecurity is not due to self-selection.Union, Perceived Job Insecurity

Applied knowledge management : a set of well-tried tools

For almost 20 years, Knowledge Management projects hit various domains. This paper focuses on selected tools now of general practice and becoming popular among the practitioners. Originally out of the Information Science labs, the tools introduced here have been proved tested efficient and reliable after hundreds of real projects, no matter what type of industry and domain use them. This paper aims to briefly describe a set of four well-tried Knowledge Management tools allowing practitioners to analyse and structure, describe and represent, share and store, teach and transmit knowledge. This now common practice should open the path to new models for the Knowledge Economy. Dealing with complexity becomes easier as well as putting the Information system at the crossing of the interactive information flows instead of keeping it out of reach of a majority of knowledge workers. Due to the massive retirement of the baby boomers, a large loss of workforce challenges the companies for the first time in history. How to evaluate and pass to the next generation its core business of knowledge is thus of critical importance. This paper reminds that Knowledge Management is no longer a solely academic issue since tools of the next generation are now available, beefing up the growing domain of the knowledge economy.E-learning, Intranets, Knowledge economy, Knowledge management