An Incentives Approach to Improving the Unemployment Compensation System

Overpayments may account for up to 15 percent of all payments made under the unemployment compensation system. Burgess and Kingston propose that this overpayment serves as a clue to the more serious problems residing in the system. The authors focus on the lack of incentives (or the existence of disincentives) for improvement within the UC program structure for all participants - claimants, employers, and state UC agencies. Other issues they explore include the excessive complexity of the system and the difficulty of effectively monitoring claimant compliance with eligibility criteria.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1116/thumbnail.jp

Lay judges and labor courts: a question of legitimacy

This article reviews the role of lay judges in labor courts in five European Union countries (Germany, France, Great Britain, Ireland and Sweden). We find that a very high proportion of judgments are unanimous in all five countries, despite imputed differences of interest between the employee, employer and professional judges and significant variations in the way that lay judges are selected, trained and deployed. This suggests that one key contribution of lay judges is to provide legitimacy to the decision making process. Three different facets of legitimacy are explored, but further empirical research is needed to establish why decisions are generally unanimous and how legitimacy might be more systematically compared cross-nationally

Management of COVID-19 in the community and the role of primary care: how the pandemic has shone light on a fragmented health system

[Extract] The Australian health care system is well regarded on the global stage in terms of the balance between investment in health care and outcomes delivered, particularly in terms of universal access, quality and safety.1 However, there is considerable fragmentation and poor coordination of care and communication between hospitals and primary care, which limits further improvement.2, 3 Geographical barriers, workforce shortages and issues relating to acceptability of services limit health care access for residents of rural, regional and remote communities, Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, and together with an inadequate focus on prevention, limit progress towards health equity. Australian responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic through both public health responses and the acute health sector have been viewed as among the best in the world. Nevertheless, challenges in the structure, organisatIon and financing of the Australian health care system have been brought into stark relief by the evolution of responses to the pandemic

Silvoarable agroforestry

Introduction: A silvoarable system of land management implies the cultivation of trees and arable crops on the same area of land, a system practised quite commonly in southern Europe and in the tropics. The system comprises two components: tree rows, generally one tree wide, and arable alleys, alternating across the field. The first major development of silvoarable practice in the UK took place during the 1960s and 1970s when Bryant & May established extensive poplar plantations on lowland farmland in southern England to supply their own market for match veneer timber (Beaton, 1987). Since the demise of the Bryant Sr May market for match timber in 1978, interest in the potential for silvoarable systems lay dormant until the advent of food crop surpluses in the 1980s

Soil carbon changes after establishing woodland and agroforestry trees in a grazed pasture

This study determined the effect of two tree planting methods (woodland and a silvopastoral agroforestry system) on the soil bulk density and organic carbon content of a grassland site in lowland England. Soil organic carbon was measured in pasture, silvopastoral tree, and woodland treatments at six depths representative of 0–150 cm. Fourteen years after tree planting, the organic carbon content in the surface soil layer (0–10 cm) was greatest in the pasture (6.0 g 100 g− 1) and least in the woodland (4.6 g 100 g− 1); the value (5.3 g 100 g− 1) below the silvopastoral trees was intermediate. In the 10–20 cm layer, the organic carbon content in the woodland was 13% lower than the pasture. No treatment effects on soil carbon were detected below 20 cm. Possible reasons for the decline in surface soil carbon include a decline in grass cover and reduced soil water content. Measurements of above ground carbon storage by the trees indicated that tree planting increased overall carbon storage, with the silvopastoral system predicted to achieve a higher level of carbon storage than equivalent areas of separate woodland and pasture. A power analysis indicates that a prohibitively large number of replicates is needed to ensure a lower than 20% risk of falsely concluding no treatment differences at individual depth increments below 10 cm and cumulative depths extending below 40 cm

Noise kernel for a quantum field in Schwarzschild spacetime under the Gaussian approximation

A method is given to compute an approximation to the noise kernel, defined as the symmetrized connected 2-point function of the stress tensor, for the conformally invariant scalar field in any spacetime conformal to an ultra-static spacetime for the case in which the field is in a thermal state at an arbitrary temperature. The most useful applications of the method are flat space where the approximation is exact and Schwarzschild spacetime where the approximation is better than it is in most other spacetimes. The two points are assumed to be separated in a timelike or spacelike direction. The method involves the use of a Gaussian approximation which is of the same type as that used by Page to compute an approximate form of the stress tensor for this field in Schwarzschild spacetime. All components of the noise kernel have been computed exactly for hot flat space and one component is explicitly displayed. Several components have also been computed for Schwarzschild spacetime and again one component is explicitly displayed.Comment: 34 pages, no figures. Substantial revisions in Secs. I, IV, and V; minor revisions elsewhere; new results include computation of the exact noise kernel for hot flat space and an approximate computation of the noise kernel for a thermal state at an arbitrary temperature in Schwarzschild spacetime when the points are split in the time directio

Open String Wavefunctions in Warped Compactifications

We analyze the wavefunctions for open strings in warped compactifications, and compute the warped Kahler potential for the light modes of a probe D-brane. This analysis not only applies to the dynamics of D-branes in warped backgrounds, but also allows to deduce warping corrections to the closed string Kahler metrics via their couplings to open strings. We consider in particular the spectrum of D7-branes in warped Calabi-Yau orientifolds, which provide a string theory realizations of the Randall-Sundrum scenario. We find that certain background fluxes, necessary in the presence of warping, couple to the fermionic wavefunctions and qualitatively change their behavior. This modified dependence of the wavefunctions are needed for consistency with supersymmetry, though it is present in non-supersymmetric vacua as well. We discuss the deviations of our setup from the RS scenario and, as an application of our results, compute the warping corrections to Yukawa couplings in a simple model. Our analysis is performed both with and without the presence of D-brane world-volume flux, as well as for the case of backgrounds with varying dilaton.Comment: 52 pages, refs. added, minor correction

Modelling the Interactions of Soils, Climate, and Management for Grass Production in England and Wales

This study examines the effectiveness of a model called LINGRA-N-Plus to simulate the interaction of climate, soil and management on the green leaf and total dry matter yields of ryegrass in England and Wales. The LINGRA-N-Plus model includes modifications of the LINGRA-N model such as temperature- and moisture-dependent soil nitrogen mineralization and differential partitioning to leaves and stems with thermal time from the last harvest. The resulting model was calibrated against the green leaf and total grass yields from a harvest interval x nitrogen application experiment described by Wilman et al. (1976). When the LINGRA-N-Plus model was validated against total grass yields from nitrogen experiments at ten sites described by Morrison et al. (1980), its modelling efficiency improved greatly compared to the original LINGRA-N. High predicted yields, at zero nitrogen application, were related to soils with a high initial nitrogen content. The lowest predicted yields occurred at sites with low rainfall and shallow rooting depth; mitigating the effect of drought at such sites increased yields by up to 4 t ha−1. The results highlight the usefulness of grass models, such as LINGRA-N-Plus, to explore the combined effects of climate, soil, and management, like nitrogen application, and harvest intervals on grass productivity