Association of Type 1 Diabetes vs Type 2 Diabetes Diagnosed During Childhood and Adolescence With Complications During Teenage Years and Young Adulthood

The burden and determinants of complications and comorbidities in contemporary youth-onset diabetes are unknown

The Relationship Between Establishment Training and the Retention of Older Workers: Evidence from Germany The Relationship Between Establishment Training and the Retention of Older Workers: Evidence from Germany

ABSTRACT The Relationship Between Establishment Training and the Retention of Older Workers: Evidence from Germany In the coming years, a substantial portion of Germany's workforce will retire, making it difficult for businesses to meet human capital needs. Training older workers may be a successful strategy for managing this demographic transition. This study examines relationships between establishment training programs, wages, and retirement among older men and women. Using unique matched establishment-employee data from Germany, the authors find that when establishments offer special training programs targeted at older workers, womenand especially lower wage women -are less likely to retire. Results suggest this relationship may be due to greater wage growth. For men, findings suggest establishment offer of inclusion in standard training programs may improve retention of low wage men, but analysis of pre-existing differences in establishment retirement patterns suggests this relationship may not be causal. Our research suggests targeted training programs likely play an important role in retaining and advancing careers of low wage older women. The aging of populations in many developed countries has significant implications for working populations and the age composition of workforces within organizations. Driven primarily by increased life expectancy and declining birth rates, these demographic trends are consistent across developed economies Facing an aging workforce, German policymakers have encouraged people to work longer by gradually raising the age at which workers can obtain full pension benefits (Börsch- The analysis from Armstrong-Stassen and Ursel Boockmann, Fries, & Goebel (2012) used a smaller version of the LIAB dataset that was limited to a random draw of 300 establishments. Although they found no relationship between establishment training and employee retention, they do not control for the overall rate of training participation among workers within the establishment. This may be an important omission because firms that train older workers may also have higher rates of training throughout the 1 Respondents use a 5 point Likert scale to rate the availability of training opportunities that are "adapted to their needs", "extend their computer skills", "develop their management skills", and "continuously update their skills." But respondents are not asked to rate the availability of any training opportunities. Therefore, it is possible that respondents who were offered ineffective training or training that did not address the specific skills asked about in the survey would be coded in the same way as respondents who did not receive any training opportunities. Furthermore, the sample consisted only of managers and the relationship between training practices and retention behavior may vary by occupation. 5 organization, offer better quality training, or be more invested in employee development in general. Moreover, this study does not investigate the mechanisms through which training is thought to affect older worker retention. Our work addresses gaps in this literature in several ways. We use a broader representative sample of establishments with greater statistical power, incorporate controls for the amount of training participation occurring throughout the establishment workforce, investigate potential differences in effects by gender, and focus on discerning the mechanism by which training affects older worker retention. With regard to this last point, we examine joint effects of training practices, and how they may operate in conjunction with other establishment practices for older workers. In addition, we explore wages as a likely mechanism for explaining the relationship between training and retention of older workers. Establishment Training Practices and Other Practices for Older Workers Establishments that train their older workers face a choice. They can offer programs that include older workers in a standard training program designed for their entire workforce, offer targeted training programs, or use some combination of these two delivery strategies. This decision may influence both the effectiveness of the training itself and any relationship with Other practices may also encourage longer working lives, either individually or as part of a system of human resources (HR) practices. These include reduced performance requirements, mixed-age work teams, special equipment for older workers, and partial retirement allowing older workers to reduce their work hours before retiring. Because HR practices offered in bundles may have synergistic effects (B. E. Becker & Gerhart 1996), we examine both direct and joint effects of training practices and other practices related to older workers. We expect that practices which allow older workers to perform work differently, such as reduced performance requirements and special equipment for older workers, and practices such as partial retirement that create schedule differences between older and younger workers, will be more likely to increase retention when combined with the offer of targeting training. Conversely, we expect the use of mixed aged teams to have a more positive effect on retention when older workers are included in offers of standard training also available to younger workers. Gender differences There are strong reasons to believe the relationship between training and retention may differ by gender among older German workers. On average, German women have substantially Finally, in Germany statutory age of eligibility for social security benefits has differed by gender. In cohorts born before 1946, women could retire with full old age social security benefits earlier than men, creating gender differences in the investment horizons for returns to training. A Possible Mechanism: Training and Wages Human capital theory predicts firm specific training enhances productivity and increases wages within the current firm relative to alternative employment opportunities, which enables the training firm to pay higher wages and provides incentives for both employers and employees There are three reasons to expect training to increase retention especially for lower wage workers. First, if there are diminishing returns to training then those with less human capital may experience the greatest increase in productivity and wages when they participate in training, and those with less human capital (lower wage workers) are more likely to participate. Second, for institutional reasons even training that would boost productivity may be less likely to lead to a raise for high wage employees if they are already at the top of their paygrades. Third, even if training would lead to the same wage growth for low and high wage earners, high wage earners are likely to have greater non-labor income and have greater pension wealth assuming the same years of service under the German pension system. Thus, high wage earners would be more likely to respond to an increase in wages by choosing to retire than choosing to work longer. In addition to expecting differences in the effects of training on retention across the wage distribution, if wages are a mechanism through which training improves retention then the same training practices that promote retention should also be associated with greater wage growth. Methods Sample This study uses matched data from the Linked Employer-Employee Data (LIAB) of the Key Variables The dependent variable in the analysis is retirement from the establishment: "Retire." Retire is equal to 1 in the last year a worker appears in the LIAB data (using all years [2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008] and 0 in all earlier years (provided the establishment continues to appear), with missing 2 A detailed discussion of sample selection and non-response can be found in Standard reflects a "one size fits all" approach and Targeted reflects the availability of custom programs designed for older workers. An additional important covariate, Participation, provides a measure of training participation across all establishment employees. Participation is reported in the establishment survey as either the number of individuals participating in training over the year or the number of instances of training. In the latter case, an employee participating in two training programs would be counted twice. Establishments decide how to report their training participation. We normalized this variable by dividing it by the total number of employees in the establishment In [1], β1 and β2 estimate the effects of offering each type of training on retirement hazard rates, which are defined as the probability that an individual retires in year t provided that they have not retired by t-1. If the offer of training promotes retention of older workers then its coefficient should be negative. β3 estimates the marginal change in retirement likelihood resulting from a one percentage point change in the training participation measure for establishments that report Participation as the number of individuals (Reporting = 0), and β3 + β5 provides the marginal effect for establishments that report number of training incidences (Reporting = 1). β4 reflects any differences in retirement behavior when establishments change to reporting training as incidences instead of individuals. Fixed differences between establishments due to different reporting styles are captured by λj. X includes individual establishment tenure, daily wage rate, educational attainment, and whether the individual works part-time. Among full-time employees, we control for blue-collar versus white-collar occupations. All regressions control for individual age using a full set of age dummy variables to capture discontinuities in retirement behavior due to norms and pension 13 incentives. Z includes time varying measures of establishment annual revenue, total employment, and average employee wage. We also include a subjective measure of establishment profitability, rated on a five-point scale from "unsatisfactory" to "very good," to better capture financial performance. Including establishment fixed effects helps to rule out the possibility that establishments adopting training practices for older workers are generally better places to work and so would have higher retention rates, even without offering training. However, it does not eliminate the possibility that establishments adopting training practices also implemented other practices that are aimed at older workers that could affect retention. However, an individual's position in the labor market distribution is not necessarily the same as position within the establishment earning distribution. As explained, one reason to expect a weaker relationship between training and retention among older workers is older workers are more likely to be near the top of their pay grades within the establishment. Although we do not have information on actual pay grades, our data contains individual wages for all workers (young and old) within the establishment in each year and from this information we construct establishment specific wage quintiles and define a categorical variable, EWQ, which is equal to the establishment wage quintile each older worker in our analysis sample falls within. We again expand Equation If wages are a mechanism through which training practices influence retention of older workers, then there should be a direct relationship between establishment training practices and wages. To test for this relationship, we estimate the following regression equations

Overweight and stunting in migrant Hispanic children in the USA

Obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and metabolic syndrome (MS) are common in patients with heart failure (HF). Studies investigating the association between known biomarkers and adiposity in patient populations are limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between C-reactive protein (CRP) and leptin with adiposity in a sub-group of overweight/obese patients with HF, DM and/or MS. A total of 36 patients (mean age, 56.72±9.78 years; ranging between 27 and 76 years of age; 80.6% male; 52.8% Caucasian) were enrolled and their height, weight, waist circumference and body composition (e.g. percentage body fat and lean mass), as well as the levels of CRP and leptin, were assessed. The results demonstrated that there was a significant association between CRP and leptin, CRP and body mass index (BMI) and gender and percentage body fat (

An assessment of the measurement of performance in international business research

A sizeable body of international business (IB) research is devoted to building knowledge about the determinants of organizational performance. A key precursor to accurately diagnosing why some organizations succeed in the international marketplace while others struggle is operationalizing performance appropriately. Yet, to date, no systematic investigation has considered how well IB research measures performance. We examine the measurement of performance in 96 articles published in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of International Business Studies, Management Science, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal between 1995 and 2005. The findings reveal that most studies do not measure performance in a manner that captures the multifaceted nature of the construct. We describe the implications of these results, and offer suggestions for improving future practice. Journal of International Business Studies (2008) 39, 1064–1080. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400398