Duration of Non-Work Spells in the Workers' Compensation Insurance System: Unionized vs. Non-Unionized Workers

This paper analyzes the effect of unions on the duration of non- work spells of claimants in the workers' compensation insurance system. It has been argued that a union may affect the duration of non-work spells in two ways. First, a union may alter the true level of workplace safety and, in turn, affect both the frequency and severity of work-related injuries ('true safety' effect). Second, a union may influence workers' incentives to file claims or stay in the system for the longer non-work spell ('claims-reporting moral hazard' effect). This study analyzes 9,818 workers' compensation claims filed with the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry for injuries that occurred in 1993 and 1994 in 873 sample firms included in the Minnesota Human Resource Management Practice (MHRMP) Survey. To correct for the right-censoring data problem, we use a maximum likelihood estimate of duration of nonwork spells using the Weibull distribution. Empirical results show that being a union member is associated with a 19% increase in the duration of non-work spells. This means that, on average, the non-work spells are approximately ten days longer for workers from unionized firms as compared to their non-unionized counterparts in the sample of this study.

Performance Analysis of a Novel GPU Computation-to-core Mapping Scheme for Robust Facet Image Modeling

Though the GPGPU concept is well-known in image processing, much more work remains to be done to fully exploit GPUs as an alternative computation engine. This paper investigates the computation-to-core mapping strategies to probe the efficiency and scalability of the robust facet image modeling algorithm on GPUs. Our fine-grained computation-to-core mapping scheme shows a significant performance gain over the standard pixel-wise mapping scheme. With in-depth performance comparisons across the two different mapping schemes, we analyze the impact of the level of parallelism on the GPU computation and suggest two principles for optimizing future image processing applications on the GPU platform

Safety Practices, Firm Culture, and Workplace Injuries

The authors present analysis of the impact of various HRM practices on firms’ workers’ compensation costs; specifically, which practices lower firms’ workers’ compensation costs and whether the impact is the result of changes in technical efficiency or comes through induced changes in workers’ behavior.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1037/thumbnail.jp

Human Resource Management and Safety: Technical Efficiency and Economic Incentives

The authors present analysis of the impact of various HRM practices on firms’ workers’ compensation costs; specifically, which practices lower firms’ workers’ compensation costs and whether the impact is the result of changes in technical efficiency or comes through induced changes in workers’ behavior.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1037/thumbnail.jp

TOOLS TO RETAIN ADDED VALUE IN DAIRY FARMS: THE SOUTH KOREA CASE

South Korea witnessed an increase in the average size of dairy farms over the past decade, probably because of high production costs especially relevant for farms with less than 40 heads. Korean dairy farms have production costs that are 63.9% higher than the international milk price, and the producer support by the Korean government is 2.5 times higher than the average of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Considering a possible reduction of public support, and the increasing market openings, one of the objectives for farmers would be to try retaining on farm a higher added value for their dairy products such as cheese and fermented milk. Out of this perspective, and on the basis of a questionnaire that involved the great part of the farmers that produce cheese, this paper describes three possible tools for the valorization of dairy products: short supply chains and direct marketing, dedicated supply chains with certification and labels and the approach values based supply chains

Salmonella typhimurium harboring plasmid expressing interleukin-12 induced attenuation of infection and protective immune responses

IL-12 is known to be an essential cytokine which appears to provide protective immunity against intracellular bacteria, such as Salmonella. In this study, we investigated the possibility of developing a vaccine using IL-12 against virulent Salmonella. We used the host defense system activated by cytokine IL-12. The highly virulent Salmonella strain (Salmonella typhimurium UK-1) was transformed with cytokine-expressing plasmids. These live, wild-type pathogens were used as vaccine strains without undergoing any other biological or genetic attenuating processes. The newly developed strains induced partial protection from infections (30-40%). Of note, the interleukin-12 transformed pathogen was safe upon immunization with low doses (103 CFU), induced IgG responses, and stimulated protective immune responses against Salmonella Typhimurium in mice (80-100%). These results suggest that IL-12 induced attenuation of wild-type Salmonella in the host infection stage and vaccine development using the wild-type strain harboring IL-12 secreting plasmids may be considered as an alternative process for intracellular bacterial vaccine development without the inconvenience of time-consuming attenuation processes