The Productivity Effect of Non-Union Representation

Declining union density in many industrialized countries directs attention to alter- native ways of labor relations and worker representation as, e.g., works councils. German works councils belong to the most powerful worker representations in de- veloped countries but little is known of their causal effect on productivity. A large linked employer-employee panel is used to examine this issue. Comparing firms with and without a works council I find that firms with a works council are on average 6.5 percent more productive. I present evidence that this estimate is the lower bound to the causal productivity effect of works councils.worker participation, works council, productivity

Teacher experience and the class size effect - experimental evidence

We analyze teacher experience as a moderating factor for the effect of class size reduction on student achievement in the early grades using data from the Tennessee STAR experiment with random assignment of teachers and students to classes of different size. The analysis is motivated by the high costs of class size reductions and the need to identify the circumstances under which this investment is most rewarding. We find a class size effect only for senior teachers. The effect is most pronounced for higher and average-performing students. We further show that senior teachers outperform rookies only in small classes. The results have straightforward policy implications. Interestingly, the class size effect is most likely due to a higher quality of instruction in small classes and not due to less disruptions. --class size reduction,teacher experience,student achievement

Are the firm owners really worse off with a works council?

As they are employee associations, it is typically presumed that works councils redistribute economic rents from firm owners to workers. And indeed, empirical literature suggests that works councils reduce profits although, at the same time, they increase productivity. Studies on the profitability effect of works councils, however, mainly use self-reported subjective profit evaluations of managers as the dependent variable. I additionally use objective measures to check the validity of these results. While negative effects are reproduced with the subjective measure, non-negative effects for the objective measures contradict previous results. With the objective measures, the works council effect on profit further increases if attempts are made to control for self-selection, and it is generally positive if the establishment is covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Further results indicate that the subjective profit measure is a poor measure of actual profits and that it is hardly appropriate as a dependent variable in a profit regression.worker participation, works council, profit, rent distribution

Capital stock approximation using firm level panel data

Many recent studies exploring conditional factor demand or factor substitution issues use firm level panel data. A considerable number of establishment panels contains no direct information on the capital input, necessary for production or cost function estimation. Incorrect measurement of capital leads to biased esti- mates and casts doubt on any inference on output elasticities or input substitution properties. The perpetual inventory approach, commonly used for long panels, is a method that attenuates these problems. In this paper a modified perpetual in- ventory approach is proposed. This method provides more reliable measures for capital input when short firm panels are used and no direct information on capital input is available. The empirical results based on a replication study of Addison et al. (2006) support the conclusion that modified perpetual inventory is superior to previous attempts in particular when fixed effects estimation techniques are used. The method thus makes a considerable number of recently established firm pan- els accessible to more sophisticated production function or factor demand analyses.production function, capital input

On critical normal sections for two-dimensional immersions in R^n and a Riemann-Hilbert problem

For orthonormal normal sections of two-dimensional immersions in R^4 we define torsion coefficients and a functional for the total torsion. We discuss normal sections which are critical for this functional. In particular, a global estimate for the torsion coefficients of a critical normal section in terms of the curvature of the normal bundle is provided

Hadronization via Recombination

The recombination model as a model for hadronization from a quark-gluon plasma has been recently revived since it has advantages in explaining several important features of the final state produced in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC, such as the constituent quark number scaling of the elliptic coefficient versus the transverse energy of identified hadrons, the bending shape of the $p_T$ spectrum of hadrons near 5 GeV/c, and the measured large value of baryon to meson ratio(of the order of unity) in the same $p_T$ range. We have developed a dynamic simulation model of heavy-ion collisions in which a quark-gluon plasma, starting from a certain initial condition, evolves hydrodynamically until it reaches the phase boundary, and then hadronizes by valence quark recombination. Rescattering after hadronization is described by UrQMD. We discuss some details of the model and report first, preliminary results.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, plenary talk at SQM2008 Conference(Beijing, China, Oct 6-10,2008

Computational tools for quadratic Chabauty

http://math.bu.edu/people/jbala/2020BalakrishnanMuellerNotes.pdfhttp://math.bu.edu/people/jbala/2020BalakrishnanMuellerNotes.pdfFirst author draf