Quits, worker recruitment, and firm growth: theory and evidence

The authors use establishment data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) to study the micro-level behavior of worker quits and their relation to recruitment and establishment growth. They find that quits decline with establishment growth, playing the most important role at slowly contracting firms. They also find a robust, positive relationship between an establishment's reported hires and vacancies and the incidence of a quit. This relationship occurs despite the finding that quits decline, and hires and vacancies increase, with establishment growth. The authors characterize these dynamics within a labor-market search model with on-the-job search, a convex cost of creating new positions, and multi-worker establishments. The model distinguishes between recruiting to replace a quitting worker and recruiting for a new position, and relates this distinction to firm performance. Beyond giving rise to a varying quit propensity, the model generates endogenously determined thresholds for firm contraction (through both layoffs and attrition), worker replacement, and firm expansion. The continuum of decision rules derived from these thresholds produces rich firm-level dynamics and quit behavior that are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence of the JOLTS data.Employment (Economic theory)

More on Unemployment and Vacancy Fluctuations

Shimer (2005a) argues that the Mortensen-Pissarides equilibrium search model of unemployment explains only about 10% of the response in the job-finding rate to an aggregate productivity shock. Some of the recent papers inspired by his critique are reviewed and commented on here. Specifically, we suggest that the sole problem is neither the procyclicality of the wage nor the failure to account fully for the opportunity cost of employment. Although an amended version of the model, one that accounts for capital costs and counter cyclic involuntary separations, does much better, it still explains only 40% of the observed volatility of the job-finding rate. Finally, allowing for on-the-job search does not improve the amended models implications for the amplification of productivity shocks.

The Non-Place between Sacred and Profane: Utopian Gestures in the Apparatus of Semiocapitalism in Laurent Cantet’s L\u27emploi du temps

This paper demonstrates the possibility of the utopian use of late capitalist non-places through Laurent Cantet’s film L\u27emploi du temps, arguing that the protagonist’s mental breakdown caused by cognitive overstimulation open up an unexpected critical perspective through which the contradictions of the system become visible. With the help of Agamben’s theory of profanation I argue that the hero’s inoperative, free use of former sites mediating semiocapitalist flows offers an example of a form-of-life that is not captured by the apparatuses of commodification

Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus

This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited

Extension of ImageNotion to Allow Privacy-Aware Image Sharing

A growing number of users in Web 2.0 based social network sites and photo sharing portals upload millions of images per day. In many cases, this leads to serious privacy threats. The images reveal not only the personal relationships and attitudes of the user who uploads the images, but those of other persons displayed in the images as well. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for privacy-aware image sharing. Our approach is based on the ImageNotion application, which combines automated processes to create high-quality semantic image annotations

Fixed-Term Contracts in Europe: A Reassessment in Light of the Importance of Match-Specific Learning

The use of fixed-term contracts has proliferated during the past decade in many European countries due to the relaxation of their regulation. Policymakers aimed to reduce labor-market rigidities by offering to firms these flexible contracts with little or no dismissal costs but with a finite contract length. The analysis of these contracts has thus far focused on their effect on the overall employment rate. This study high-lights that in the evaluation of fixed-term contracts as policy instruments it is also important to look at their effect on productivity as a function of tenure and on the tenure distribution of employed workers. These two effects jointly determine the policy's overall productivity effect. I show that the liberalization of fixed-term contracts can have a significant effect on the productivity of employment relationships when match-specific learning is important. Moreover, the effect is different depending on the assumption about the nature of the learning process. I distinguish between two kinds of match-specific learning - learning-by-doing and learning about match quality - and show that under learning-by-doing the overall productivity effect is necessarily negative, while under learning about match quality the effect could be either negative or positive depending on how much experimentation improves in the presence of fixed-term contracts. I calibrate the model based on earlier empirical work and find that indeed the productivity effect is positive as output per worker increases by 0.6%

Fixed-Term Contracts in Europe: A Reassessment in Light of the Importance of Match-Specific Learning

The use of fixed-term contracts has proliferated during the past decade in many European countries due to the relaxation of their regulation. Policymakers aimed to reduce labor-market rigidities by offering to firms these flexible contracts with little or no dismissal costs but with a finite contract length. The analysis of these contracts has thus far focused on their effect on the overall employment rate. This study high-lights that in the evaluation of fixed-term contracts as policy instruments it is also important to look at their effect on productivity as a function of tenure and on the tenure distribution of employed workers. These two effects jointly determine the policy's overall productivity effect. I show that the liberalization of fixed-term contracts can have a significant effect on the productivity of employment relationships when match-specific learning is important. Moreover, the effect is different depending on the assumption about the nature of the learning process. I distinguish between two kinds of match-specific learning - learning-by-doing and learning about match quality - and show that under learning-by-doing the overall productivity effect is necessarily negative, while under learning about match quality the effect could be either negative or positive depending on how much experimentation improves in the presence of fixed-term contracts. I calibrate the model based on earlier empirical work and find that indeed the productivity effect is positive as output per worker increases by 0.6%.

Dynamical effects induced by long range activation in a nonequilibrium reaction-diffusion system

We both show experimentally and numerically that the time scales separation introduced by long range activation can induce oscillations and excitability in nonequilibrium reaction-diffusion systems that would otherwise only exhibit bistability. Namely, we show that the Chlorite-Tetrathionate reaction, where autocatalytic species diffuses faster than the substrates, the spatial bistability domain in the nonequilibrium phase diagram is extended with oscillatory and excitability domains. A simple model and a more realistic model qualitatively account for the observed behavior. The latter model provides quantitative agreement with the experiments.Comment: 19 pages + 9 figure