The effect of monitoring unemployment insurance recipients on unemployment duration: evidence from a field experiment

Programme administration is a relatively neglected issue in the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups. Treatment increases the monitoring of claims - claimants make more frequent visits to the employment office and face questioning about their search behaviour. Treatment has quite a large effect on durations on benefit of women aged 30 and over, while we find no effect for younger women or men.field experiment, monitoring, job search, unemployment insurance, Hungary

The Implications of Exhausting Unemployment Insurance Entitlement in Hungary

The single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) register in Hungary is not by getting a job but by running out of entitlement to benefit. This situation raises two questions. First, what are the implications of the cessation of UI for living standards? Second, does UI exhaustion have much effect on the probability of getting a job through increasing incentives to work? We investigate these issues with a survey of persons exhausting entitlement to UI in Summer 1995, paying special attention to the household circumstances of the unemployed and to the probabilities of claiming and being awarded means-tested assistance benefit.

The Informational Value of Job Search Data and the Dynamics of Search Behaviour: Evidence from Hungary

Labour market analysis places much emphasis on the concept of search. But there is insufficient empirical information on (a) the relationship between reported search and job-finding and (b) how search behaviour changes over a spell without work. We investigate these issues using a sample constructed from Hungarian labour force survey panel data of the flow from jobs to the state of "joblessness". The results on job exits call into question aspects of the standard international classification of "unemployment" and "out of the labour force". Transitions during joblessness in and out of search and the various categories of non-search are found to be only modest.

Constraining a fourth generation of quarks: non-perturbative Higgs boson mass bounds

We present a non-perturbative determination of the upper and lower Higgs boson mass bounds with a heavy fourth generation of quarks from numerical lattice computations in a chirally symmetric Higgs-Yukawa model. We find that the upper bound only moderately rises with the quark mass while the lower bound increases significantly, providing additional constraints on the existence of a straight-forward fourth quark generation. We examine the stability of the lower bound under the addition of a higher dimensional operator to the scalar field potential using perturbation theory, demonstrating that it is not significantly altered for small values of the coupling of this operator. For a Higgs boson mass of $\sim125\mathrm{GeV}$ we find that the maximum value of the fourth generation quark mass is $\sim300\mathrm{GeV}$, which is already in conflict with bounds from direct searches.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Higgs boson mass bounds in the presence of a heavy fourth quark family

We present Higgs boson mass bounds in a lattice regularization allowing thus for non-perturbative investigations. In particular, we employ a lattice modified chiral invariant Higgs-Yukawa model using the overlap operator. We show results for the upper and lower Higgs boson mass bounds in the presence of a heavy mass-degenerate quark doublet with masses ranging up to 700 GeV. We perform infinite volume extrapolations in most cases, and examine several values of the lattice cutoff. Furthermore, we argue that the lower Higgs boson mass bound is stable with respect to the addition of higher dimensional operators to the scalar field potential. Our results have severe consequences for the phenomenology of a fourth generation of quarks if a light Higgs boson is discovered at the LHC

Measuring the Generosity of Unemployment Benefit Systems: Evidence from Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe

The paper considers two aspects of the targeting of unemployment benefit systems (a) the probability that benefit is received in the population of those unemployed on standard international criteria of search and availability, and (b) the probability in the population of benefit recipients that search is conducted. The focus is on Hungary but stylised facts for a range of Central European countries and two EU comparators are derived in the first part of the paper. The second part of the paper finds that most of the large decline in coverage of the Hungarian unemployed by insurance benefit (received by only a quarter of the searching stock in 1997) cannot be explained by changes in the composition of unemployment observable in labour force survey data (including unemployment duration). The probability of active search (search other than through a state employment office) is found to be very similar for those receiving insurance and assistance benefit.

Entity Recognition via Multimodal Sensor Fusion with Smart Phones

This thesis serves as an exploration that takes the sensors within a cell phone beyond the current state of recognition activities. Current state of the art sensor recognition processes tend to focus on recognizing user activity. Utilizing the same sensors available for user activity classification, this thesis validates the ability to gather data about entities separate from the user carrying the smart phone. With the ability to sense entities, the ability to recognize and classify a multitude of items, situations, and phenomena opens a new realm of possibilities for how devices perceive and react to their environment

The Summer Climate at Sam Lake, Yukon Territory

A weather station was established at Sam Lake in the British Mountains of the northern Yukon Territory in the summer of 1974. Information was collected on temperature, winds, cloud cover and precipitation. The summer conditions were found to be influenced mainly by arctic weather disturbances originating in the Beaufort Sea. A comparison of the information recorded at Sam Lake with that from coastal stations served to demonstrate the buffering effect of the mountains

An Unusual Case of Appendiceal Adenocarcinoma Presenting with Rectal Bleeding and Haematuria

Adenocarcinoma of the appendix is rare, usually being diagnosed intraoperatively when performing appendicectomy or at subsequent histological examination. Here we report a case with acute abdominal pain, rectal bleeding with haematuria being the presenting symptoms. Subsequent computerised tomography demonstrated a complex mass involving the ileum, right colon, sigmoid colon and bladder with inflammatory bowel disease being the most likely cause. At laparotomy a right hemicolectomy, sigmoid colectomy and partial cystectomy was performed with pathological specimens confirming an appendiceal adenocarcinoma as the primary source of the abdominal mass fistulating into adjacent structures. We conclude that although appendiceal tumours are rare – usually diagnosed at appendicectomy, they should be considered in the diagnosis of complex abdominal masses involving small bowel, large bowel and adjacent pelvic structures