Hiring Costs of Skilled Workers and the Supply of Firm-Provided Training

This paper analyzes how the costs of hiring skilled workers from the external labor market affect a firm's supply of training. Using administrative survey data with detailed information on hiring and training costs for Swiss firms, we find evidence for substantial and increasing marginal hiring costs. However, firms can invest in internal training of unskilled workers and thereby avoid costs for external hiring. Controlling for a firm's training investment, we find that a one standard deviation increase in average external hiring costs increases the number of internal training positions by 0.7 standard deviations.hiring costs, apprenticeship training, firm-sponsored training

Informational Hold-Up, Disclosure Policy, and Career Concerns on theExample of Open Source Software Development

We consider software developers who can either work on an open source project or on a closed source project. The former provides a publicly available signal about their talent, whereas the latter provides a signal only observed by their employer. We show that a talented employee may initially prefer a less paying job as an open source developer to commercial closed source projects, because a publicly available signal gives him a better bargaining position when renegotiating wages with his employer after the signal has been revealed. Also, we derive conditions under which two effects suggested by standard intuition are reversed: a 'pooling equilibrium' (with both talented and untalented workers doing closed source) is less likely if differences in talent are large; a highly visible open source job leads to more effort in a career concerns setup. The former effect is because a higher productivity of talented workers raises not only the value but also the cost of signaling; the latter stems from more effort and the choice of a high visibility job being substitutes for the purpose of signaling. Results naturally apply to other industries with high and low visibility jobs, e.g. academic rather than commercial research, consulting rather than management

Instantons and the fixed point topological charge in the two-dimensional O(3) sigma-model

We define a fixed point topological charge for the two-dimensional O(3) lattice sigma-model which is free of topological defects. We use this operator in combination with the fixed point action to measure the topological susceptibility for a wide range of correlation lengths. The results strongly suggest that it is not a physical quantity in this model. The procedure, however, can be applied to other asymptotically free theories as well.Comment: 20 pages (3 figures), uuencoded compressed latex fil

iAnn: an event sharing platform for the life sciences

Summary: We present iAnn, an open source community-driven platform for dissemination of life science events, such as courses, conferences and workshops. iAnn allows automatic visualisation and integration of customised event reports. A central repository lies at the core of the platform: curators add submitted events, and these are subsequently accessed via web services. Thus, once an iAnn widget is incorporated into a website, it permanently shows timely relevant information as if it were native to the remote site. At the same time, announcements submitted to the repository are automatically disseminated to all portals that query the system. To facilitate the visualization of announcements, iAnn provides powerful filtering options and views, integrated in Google Maps and Google Calendar. All iAnn widgets are freely available. Availability: http://iann.pro/iannviewer Contact: [email protected]

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article

Exclusivity Clauses: Enhancing Competition, Raising Prices

In a setting where retailers and suppliers compete for each other by offering binding contracts, exclusivity clauses serve as a competitive device. As a result of these clauses, firms addressed by contracts only accept the most favorable deal. Thus the contract-issuing parties have to squeeze their final customers and transfer the surplus within the vertical supply chain. We elaborate to what extent the resulting allocation depends on the sequence of play and discuss the implications of a ban on exclusivity clause

Optimal Leniency Programs when Firms Have Cumulative and Asymmetric Evidence

An antitrust authority deters collusion using fines and a leniency program. Unlike in most of the earlier literature, our firms have imperfect cumulative evidence of the collusion. That is, cartel conviction is not automatic if one firm reports: reporting makes conviction only more likely, the more so, the more firms report. Furthermore, the evidence is distributed asymmetrically among firms. Asymmetry of the evidence can increase the cost of deterrence if the high-evidence firm chooses to remain silent. Minimum-evidence standards may counteract this effect. Under a marker system only one firm reports; this may increase the cost of deterrence