Unequal pay or unequal employment? What drives the skill-composition of labor flows in Germany?

This paper examines the determinants of gross labour flows in a context where modeling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be inadequate due to regional wage rigidities that result from central wage bargaining. In such a context, the framework that has been developed by Borjas et al. (1992) on the selectivity of internal migrants with respect to skills has to be extended to allow migrants to move to regions that best reward their skills in terms of both wages and employment. The extended framework predicts skilled workers to be disproportionately attracted to regions with higher mean wages and employment rates as well as higher regional wage and employment inequalities. Estimates from a labour flow fixed effects model and a GMM estimator show that these predictions hold, but only the effects for mean employment rates and employment inequality are robust and significant. The paper may thus be able to explain why earlier attempts to explain skill selectivity in Europe within a pure wage-based approach failed to replicate the US results. --gross migration,selectivity,wage inequality,employment inequality

When the minimum wage bites back : quantile treatment effects of a sectoral minimum wage in Germany

In this study we investigate the minimum wage (MW) effects for a German sub-construction sector where the MW bites extraordinary hard by international standards. Within a quasiexperiment we estimate the Quantile Treatment Effects of the MW on the conditional and unconditional distribution of earnings. For Eastern Germany, the results indicate significant real (nominal) wage increases that ripple up to about the 0.6th quantile. However, the MW also led to declining real wages (stagnating nominal wages) among upper-decile workers, thus reducing the average pay reward for high-skilled labour in the sector. We provide evidence that a rising labour cost burden for firms together with an increased bargaining power of employers over workers still employed in the sector led to wage moderation at the upper decile, particularly among smaller East German firms. Overall this paper demonstrates how a MW geared towards the lower rank may render unexpected side effects for other workers located higher up in the wage distribution and who are mostly assumed to be unaffected by such policy interventions

Oral History Interview: Gregory Terry

This interview is one of a series conducted concerning the history of Marshall University. This interview deals with the student politics at Marshall from 1965 to 1969, during which Greg Terry was active in student government, and the debate over student protests and recognition for the Students of a Democratic Society at Marshall. Mr. Terry also discusses: his background; President of Marshall University Dr. Stewart Smith; other people such as Paul Warren and Presidents of Marshall Dr. Nelson (Roland Nelson?) Dr. Smith, and also several newspapers.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1248/thumbnail.jp

Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? What Drives the Self-Selection of Internal Migrants in Germany?

This paper examines the determinants of internal migration in a context where wages tend to be rather inflexible at a regional scale so that regional labor demand shocks have a prolonged impact on employment rates. Regional income differentials, then, reflect both regional pay and employment differentials. In such a context, migrants tend to move to regions that best reward their skills in terms of both of these dimensions. As an extension to the Borjas framework, the paper thus hypothesizes that regions with a low employment inequality attract more unskilled workers compared to regions with unequal employment chances. By estimating a migration model for the average skill level of gross labor flows between 27 German regions, we find evidence in favor of this hypothesis. While rising employment inequality in a region raises the average skill level of an in-migrant, higher pay inequality in a region does not have a significant impact on the average skill level of its in-migrants. A higher employment inequality in Eastern as compared to Western Germany may, thus, be the missing link to explain the fact that East-West migrants tend to be rather unskilled.

What old stagers could teach us : examining age complementarities in regional innovation systems

Concerns have been raised that demographic ageing may weaken the competitiveness of knowledge-based economies and increase regional disparities. The age-creativity link is however far from clear at the aggregate level. Contributing to this debate, we estimate the causal effect of the workforce age structure on patenting activities for local labour markets in Germany using a flexible knowledge production function and accounting for potential endogeneity of the regional workforce structure. Overall, our results suggest that younger workers boost regional innovations, but this effect partly hinges on the presence of older workers as younger and older workers turn out to be complements in the production of knowledge. With demographic aging mainly increasing the older workforce and shrinking the younger one, our results imply that innovation levels in ageing societies may drop in the future. Moreover, differences in the regional age structure currently explain around a sixth of the innovation gap across German regions

Unequal pay or unequal employment? : What drives the skill-composition of labor flows in Germany?

This paper examines the determinants of gross labour flows in a context where modeling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be inadequate due to regional wage rigidities that result from central wage bargaining. In such a context, the framework that has been developed by Borjas et al. (1992) on the selectivity of internal migrants with respect to skills has to be extended to allow migrants to move to regions that best reward their skills in terms of both wages and employment. The extended framework predicts skilled workers to be disproportionately attracted to regions with higher mean wages and employment rates as well as higher regional wage and employment inequalities. Estimates from a labour flow fixed effects model and a GMM estimator show that these predictions hold, but only the effects for mean employment rates and employment inequality are robust and significant. The paper may thus be able to explain why earlier attempts to explain skill selectivity in Europe within a pure wage-based approach failed to replicate the US results

The minimum wage affects them all: evidence on employment spillovers in the roofing sector

This paper contributes to the sparse literature on employment spillovers on minimum wages by exploiting the minimum wage introduction and subsequent increases in the German roofing sector that gave rise to an internationally unprecedented hard bite of a minimum wage. We look at the chances of remaining employed in the roofing sector for workers with and without a binding minimum wage and use the plumbing sector that is not subject to a minimum wage as a suitable benchmark sector. By estimating the counterfactual wage that plumbers would receive in the roofing sector given their characteristics, we are able to identify employment effects along the entire wage distribution. The results indicate that the chances for roofers to remain employed in the sector in eastern Germany deteriorated along the entire wage distribution. Such employment spillovers to workers without a binding minimum wage may result from scale effects and/or capital-labour substitution

An Infrared Study of the Circumstellar Material Associated with the Carbon Star R Sculptoris

The asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star R Sculptoris (R Scl) is one of the most extensively studied stars on the AGB. R Scl is a carbon star with a massive circumstellar shell ($M_{shell}\sim 7.3\times10^{-3}~M_{\odot}$) which is thought to have been produced during a thermal pulse event $\sim2200$ years ago. To study the thermal dust emission associated with its circumstellar material, observations were taken with the Faint Object InfraRed CAMera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) at 19.7, 25.2, 31.5, 34.8, and 37.1 $\mu$m. Maps of the infrared emission at these wavelengths were used to study the morphology and temperature structure of the spatially extended dust emission. Using the radiative transfer code DUSTY and fitting the spatial profile of the emission, we find that a geometrically thin dust shell cannot reproduce the observed spatially resolved emission. Instead, a second dust component in addition to the shell is needed to reproduce the observed emission. This component, which lies interior to the dust shell, traces the circumstellar envelope of R Scl. It is best fit by a density profile with $n \propto r^{\alpha}$ where $\alpha=0.75^{+0.45}_{-0.25}$ and dust mass of $M_d=9.0^{+2.3}_{-4.1}\times10^{-6}~M_{\odot}$. The strong departure from an $r^{-2}$ law indicates that the mass-loss rate of R Scl has not been constant. This result is consistent with a slow decline in the post-pulse mass-loss which has been inferred from observations of the molecular gas.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, accepted to Ap

Solving Burgersʼ equation using optimal rational approximations

AbstractWe solve viscous Burgersʼ equation using a fast and accurate algorithm—referred to here as the reduction algorithm—for computing near optimal rational approximations.Given a proper rational function with n poles, the reduction algorithm computes (for a desired L∞-approximation error) a rational approximation of the same form, but with a (near) optimally small number m≪n of poles. Although it is well known that (nonlinear) optimal rational approximations are much more efficient than linear representations of functions via a fixed basis (e.g. wavelets), their use in numerical computations has been limited by a lack of efficient, robust, and accurate algorithms. The reduction algorithm presented here computes reliably (near) optimal rational approximations with high accuracy (e.g., ≈10−14) and a complexity that is essentially linear in the number n of original poles. A key tool is a recently developed algorithm for computing small con-eigenvalues of Cauchy matrices with high relative accuracy, an impossible task for standard algorithms without extended precision.Using the reduction algorithm, we develop a numerical calculus for rational representations of functions. Indeed, while operations such as multiplication and convolution increase the number of poles in the representation, we use the reduction algorithm to maintain an optimally small number of poles.To demonstrate the efficiency, robustness, and accuracy of our approach, we solve Burgersʼ equation with small viscosity ν. It is well known that its solutions exhibit moving transition regions of width O(ν), so that this equation provides a stringent test for adaptive PDE solvers. We show that optimal rational approximations capture the solutions with high accuracy using a small number of poles. In particular, we solve the equation with local accuracy ϵ=10−9 for viscosity as small as ν=10−5

Transforming Business And Society: The Impact Of IT

Business operations and processes are revolutionizing at a rapid speed and as we continue to dive into this digital age, it is of great importance to understand the impact Information Systems and Technology has on a society as a whole, the world of business, and Main Street. With this in mind, it’s clear to see that technology solutions must conform, attribute to, and honor the triple bottom line - people, planet, and profit