Misperceptions about immigration: reviewing their nature, motivations and determinants

Across Western democracies, immigration has become one of the most polarizing and salient issues, with public discourses and individual attitudes often characterized by misperceptions. This condition undermines people's ability to develop informed opinions on the matter and runs counter to the ideal of deliberative democracy. Yet, our understanding of what makes immigration so prone to misperceptions is still limited-a conundrum that this review seeks to answer in three steps. First, we take stock of the existing evidence on the nature of misperceptions about immigration. Secondly, we borrow from diverse bodies of literature to identify their motivational underpinnings and elaborate on how the protection of group identity, the defence of self-interest and security concerns can lead to distorted perceptions of immigration. Thirdly, we highlight relevant determinants of misperceptions at the level of both contextual influences and individual predispositions. We conclude that misperceptions about immigration are ubiquitous and likely to remain a key element of immigration politics

A Study of Monolithic CMOS Pixel Sensors Back-thinning and their Application for a Pixel Beam Telescope

This paper reports results on a detailed study of charge collection and signal-to-noise performance of CMOS monolithic pixel sensors before and after back-thinning and their application in a pixel beam telescope for the ALS 1.5 GeV $e^-$ beam test facility.Comment: 6 pages, one figure, to appear on the proceedings of the the Sixth International "Hiroshima" Symposium on the Development and Application of Semiconductor Tracking Detectors, Carmel, CA, September, 200

Beschäftigungswirkungen technisch-organisatorischen Wandels : eine mikroökonometrische Analyse mit dem Linked IAB-Panel (Technological and organisational change and its effects on employment : a micro-econometric analysis based on the Linked IAB Panel)

"Over the past few years the situation on the international labour markets has changed dramatically. While countries such as the United States or Great Britain are being affected by increasing wage differentials, the unemployment figures in most continental European countries are on the rise. In this context, reference is often made to a growth in international trade and a technological progress that is gaining momentum. An alternative explanation is seen in the organisational changes taking place within businesses. The aim of this paper is to examine the effects that such technological and organizational changes have on employment at different qualification levels. To do this, the IAB Linked Employer-Employee dataset for Germany is used, which provides information on individual enterprises as well as detailed information on their employment structures. Starting out from a generalised Leontief cost function, factor demand functions for employees with high, medium and low qualification levels are derived. As it cannot be assumed that the company-internal decision to introduce innovations and organizational changes is an exogenous one, a mixed simultaneous multi-equation model is estimated for the econometric specification, as this models the endogeneity explicitly. From the estimated parameters, a number of individual and cross-price elasticities between the different levels of skills are calculated. The results obtained support the hypothesis of a 'skill biased technological change' only weakly. However, organizational changes make low-skilled employees redundant while highly-qualified employees are not affected by them. Another finding is the close interdependency between innovations and organizational changes." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Beschäftigungseffekte, technischer Wandel, organisatorischer Wandel, IAB-Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz, IAB-Betriebspanel, Qualifikationsstruktur, Innovation

The IZA Evaluation Dataset: Towards Evidence-Based Labor Policy-Making

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many European countries. In recent years, a number of them have opened their administrative databases for evaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they are accurate, contain a large number of observations (in some cases the whole population) and usually cover a long period of time. However, the information contained in administrative data is normally limited to administrative purposes. Therefore, information that might be relevant for economic modeling is often absent. The IZA Evaluation Dataset aims to overcome such limitations for Germany by complementing administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency with innovative survey data. The administrative part of the dataset consists of a large random sample of inflows into unemployment in Germany from 2001 to 2008 and contains around 920,000 individuals. The complementary survey covers a panel of more than 17,000 individuals who entered unemployment between June 2007 and May 2008. They were initially interviewed shortly after becoming unemployed and then again one year later. In addition, a quarter of individuals were interviewed already after six months. The survey data also contain information on search behavior, ethnic and social networks, psychological factors, (non-)cognitive abilities, and attitudes. This paper describes the sampling and contents of the IZA Evaluation Dataset and outlines the future development.survey and administrative data, labor market policies, evaluation, attitudes, behavior, skills

20% by 2020? Economy-wide impacts of energy efficiency improvement in Germany

The paper presents results of the implementation of an efficiency strategy in Germany until 2020 which is focused on cost-effective measures. The efficiency measures are calculated in bottom-up models and translated into a top-down macro-economic model. The comparison to a business as usual simulation shows some economy-wide rebound effects of about 17% of the overall energy savings. The analysis is limited to 2020. Given that an efficiency strategy is a long-term strategy, this puts the results on the rather conservative side. The results clearly show that improved energy efficiency results in a variety of positive effects on the economy and the environment. These range from reduced greenhouse gas emissions to improved competitiveness of firms and budget savings for consumers to economy wide impacts like additional employment and economic growth. Even the consideration of rebound effects did not change this picture significantly. Thus, exploiting the huge potential stemming from cost-effective efficiency measures should have high priority for the design of energy and climate policies.energy efficiency, bottom up scenario analysis, climate policy

From Spatial Data Infrastructures to Data Spaces—A Technological Perspective on the Evolution of European SDIs

The availability of timely, accessible and well documented data plays a central role in the process of digital transformation in our societies and businesses. Considering this, the European Commission has established an ambitious agenda that aims to leverage on the favourable technological and political context and build a society that is empowered by data-driven innovation. Within this context, geospatial data remains critically important for many businesses and public services. The process of establishing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) in response to the legal provisions of the European Union INSPIRE Directive has a long history. While INSPIRE focuses mainly on 'unlocking' data from the public sector, there is need to address emerging technological trends, and consider the role of other actors such as the private sector and citizen science initiatives. The objective of this paper, given those bounding conditions is twofold. Firstly, we position SDI-related developments in Europe within the broader context of the current political and technological scenery. In doing so, we pay particular attention to relevant technological developments and emerging trends that we see as enablers for the evolution of European SDIs. Secondly, we propose a high level concept of a pan-European (geo)data space with a 10-year horizon in mind. We do this by considering today's technology while trying to adopt an evolutionary approach with developments that are incremental to contemporary SDIs

Simulation Game Concept For AI-Enhanced Teaching Of Advanced Value Stream Analysis and Design

Value stream analysis and design is employed globally by improvement teams within industrial settings to maximize value creation and eliminate waste. For ending methodical time-centricity, research expanded the methodology to incorporate diverse facets like material flow cost accounting, information logistics, and external influence factors. These enhancements, along with increasing data volumes, are prompting a re-evaluation of how professional improvement teams should think and operate. Consequently, a transformation of the pedagogical approach used for educating students and professionals necessitates novel solutions. Conventional teaching methods such as expository lectures are widely considered inadequate in promoting knowledge retention and engagement. So far, existing research has not yet resulted in a solution that can effectively impart the methodological complexity of advanced value stream analysis and design in a motivating and vivid fashion. To address this gap, this paper applies a tailored CRISP gamification framework to develop a simulation game concept. These concept enables AI-enhanced teaching of advanced value stream analysis and design focusing on identification of multi-stage resource-efficient optimization strategies. Through integration of game-based learning with AI a trained reinforcement learning agent can act either competitively or cooperatively, creating a unique form of teaching accounting the aspects personalization, adaptive feedback, content creation, and analysis and assessment