Assessing the Long-Run Economic Impact of Labour Law Systems: A theoretical Reappraisal and Analysis of New Time Series Data

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the application of labour law norms influenced by national and sectoral contexts, and by complementarities between the institutions of the labour market and those of corporate governance and financial markets. Legal origin may also operate as a force shaping the content of the law and its economic impact. Time-series analysis using a new dataset on legal change from the 1970s to the mid-2000s shows evidence of positive correlations between regulation and growth in employment and productivity, at least for France and Germany. No relationship, either positive or negative, is found for the UK, and although the US shows a weak negative relationship between regulation and employment growth, this is offset by productivity gains.labour law, employment, productivity, redistribution, complementarities, legal origins, varieties of capitalism

Assessing the Long-Run Economic Impact of Labour Law Systems: A Theoretical Reappraisal and Analysis of New Time Series Data

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the application of labour law norms influenced by national and sectoral contexts, and by complementarities between the institutions of the labour market and those of corporate governance and financial markets. Legal origin may also operate as a force shaping the content of the law and its economic impact. Time-series analysis using a new dataset on legal change from the 1970s to the mid-2000s shows evidence of positive correlations between regulation and growth in employment and productivity, at least for France and Germany. No relationship, either positive or negative is found for the UK and although the US shows a weak negative relationship between regulation and employment growth, this is offset by productivity gains

Shareholder Protection and Stock Market Development: An Empirical Test of the Legal Origins Hypothesis

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic descriptors, by taking into account a wider range of legal data, and by considering the effects of weighting variables in different ways, thereby ensuring greater consistency of cod-ing. Our analysis shows that legal origin explains part of the pattern of change in the adop-tion of shareholder protection measures over the period from the mid-1990s to the present day: in both developed and developing countries, common law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil law ones. We explain this the result on the basis of the head start common law systems had in adjusting to an emerging 'global' standard based mainly on Anglo-American practice. Our analysis also shows, however, that civil law origin was not much of an obstacle to convergence around this model, since civilian systems were catching up with their counterparts in the common law. We then investigate whether there was a link in this period between increased shareholder protection and stock market devel-opment, using a number of measures such as stock market capitalisation, the value of stock-trading and the number of listed firms, after controlling for legal origin, the state of economic development of particular countries, and their position on the World Bank rule of law index. We find no evidence of a long-run impact of legal change on stock market development. This finding is incompatible with the claim that legal origin affects the efficiency of legal rules and ultimately economic development. Possible explanations for our result are that laws have been overly protective of shareholders; transplanted laws have not worked as ex-pected; and, more generally, the exogenous legal origin effect is not as strong as widely sup-posed.Law and finance, shareholder rights, corporate governance, corporate finance, legal origins, comparative law.

Dynamic Load and Response Prediction of HAWT Blades for Health Monitoring Application

Wind turbine blades of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) are prone to damage; some insurance agencies report that as much as 40% of all claims are from blade damage. While most claims are not very expensive in comparison to other HAWT component repairs, for example, repairing of the gel coat, others, like replacing the entire blade can be one of the most expensive tasks. As the world moves toward larger and longer blades to capture more wind energy this problem will continue to grow. Inspecting wind turbine blades presents a challenge with most techniques requiring a technician to repel down the blade for inspection using nondestructive evaluation techniques such as ultrasound or X-ray. While some US companies like General Electric propose to use robots to perform blade inspections, there is an alternate solution to this problem which requires continuous monitoring of the blades. There is an ongoing study at Iowa State University to explore a real-time monitoring and analysis of blade response using a new type of skin-mounted strain-gauge sensor onto the inside surface of the blade. This technique would allow for damage to be detected sooner in order to reduce the overall operations and maintenance cost of wind turbines

Estimating fugitive bioaerosol releases from static compost windrows: feasibility of portable wind tunnel approach

An assessment of the fugitive release of bioaerosols from static compost piles was conducted at a green waste composting facility in South East England; this representing the initial stage of a programme of research into the influence of process parameters on bioaerosol emission flux. Wind tunnel experiments conducted on the surface of static windrows generated specific bioaerosol emission rates (SBER2s) at ground level of between 13 - 22 x10 3 cfu/m 2 /s for mesophilic actinomycetes and between 8 - 11 x10 3 cfu/m 2 /s for Aspergillus fumigatus. Air dispersion modelling of these emissions using the SCREEN3 air dispersion model in area source term mode was used to generate source depletion curves downwind of the facility for comparative purposes

Experimental damage detection of wind turbine blade using thin film sensor array

Damage detection of wind turbine blades is difficult due to their large sizes and complex geometries. Additionally, economic restraints limit the viability of high-cost monitoring methods. While it is possible to monitor certain global signatures through modal analysis, obtaining useful measurements over a blade\u27s surface using off-the-shelf sensing technologies is difficult and typically not economical. A solution is to deploy dedicated sensor networks fabricated from inexpensive materials and electronics. The authors have recently developed a novel large-area electronic sensor measuring strain over very large surfaces. The sensing system is analogous to a biological skin, where local strain can be monitored over a global area. In this paper, we propose the utilization of a hybrid dense sensor network of soft elastomeric capacitors to detect, localize, and quantify damage, and resistive strain gauges to augment such dense sensor network with high accuracy data at key locations. The proposed hybrid dense sensor network is installed inside a wind turbine blade model and tested in a wind tunnel to simulate an operational environment. Damage in the form of changing boundary conditions is introduced into the monitored section of the blade. Results demonstrate the ability of the hybrid dense sensor network, and associated algorithms, to detect, localize, and quantify damage

Bridge damage detection using spatiotemporal patterns extracted from dense sensor network

The alarmingly degrading state of transportation infrastructures combined with their key societal and economic importance calls for automatic condition assessment methods to facilitate smart management of maintenance and repairs. With the advent of ubiquitous sensing and communication capabilities, scalable data-driven approaches is of great interest, as it can utilize large volume of streaming data without requiring detailed physical models that can be inaccurate and computationally expensive to run. Properly designed, a data-driven methodology could enable fast and automatic evaluation of infrastructures, discovery of causal dependencies among various sub-system dynamic responses, and decision making with uncertainties and lack of labeled data. In this work, a spatiotemporal pattern network (STPN) strategy built on symbolic dynamic filtering (SDF) is proposed to explore spatiotemporal behaviors in a bridge network. Data from strain gauges installed on two bridges are generated using finite element simulation for three types of sensor networks from a density perspective (dense, nominal, sparse). Causal relationships among spatially distributed strain data streams are extracted and analyzed for vehicle identification and detection, and for localization of structural degradation in bridges. Multiple case studies show significant capabilities of the proposed approach in: (i) capturing spatiotemporal features to discover causality between bridges (geographically close), (ii) robustness to noise in data for feature extraction, (iii) detecting and localizing damage via comparison of bridge responses to similar vehicle loads, and (iv) implementing real-time health monitoring and decision making work flow for bridge networks. Also, the results demonstrate increased sensitivity in detecting damages and higher reliability in quantifying the damage level with increase in sensor network density

Indian labour law and its impact on unemployment, 1970-2006: A leximetric study

We analyse a recently developed leximetric dataset on Indian labour law over the period 1970 to 2006. Indian labour law is seen to be highly protective of workers’ interests by international standards, particularly in the area of dismissal regulation. We undertake a time-series econometric analysis to estimate the impact of the strengthening of labour laws on unemployment and industrial output in the formal economy. We find no evidence that pro-worker labour legislation leads to unemployment or industrial stagnation. Rather, pro-worker labour laws are associated with low unemployment, with the direction of causality running from unemployment and output to labour regulatio

Indian labour law and its impact on unemployment, 1970-2006: A leximetric study

We analyse a recently developed leximetric dataset on Indian labour law over the period 1970 to 2006. Indian labour law is seen to be highly protective of workers’ interests by international standards, particularly in the area of dismissal regulation. We undertake a time-series econometric analysis to estimate the impact of the strengthening of labour laws on unemployment and industrial output in the formal economy. We find no evidence that pro-worker labour legislation leads to unemployment or industrial stagnation. Rather, pro-worker labour laws are associated with low unemployment, with the direction of causality running from unemployment and output to labour regulatio