Decent Work in America: The 2005 Work Environment Index

What are the factors that make for a decent work environment and how do the conditions of work vary in different parts of the United States? To address these and similarly important questions in a clear and accessible way, we have developed a new approach for measuring the work environment on a state-bystate basis throughout the United States (including the District of Columbia) – the Work Environment Index (WEI). This is the first installment of the WEI, and we intend to update it every year. The WEI is a unique social indicator that brings together in one measure a range of factors that, in combination, define the quality of our working lives in the U.S. today. The WEI examines three basic dimensions of the U.S. work environment: job opportunities, job quality and workplace fairness. We rank the 50 states and the District of Columbia according to these three categories. Based on our measures of job opportunities, job quality, and workplace fairness, we find that, overall, Delaware offers the best relative work environment in the United States. Other states with high WEI rankings include New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Iowa. The states with the lowest WEI rankings are Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, South Carolina and Mississippi. Our state-by-state WEI ranking enables us to consider a crucial and widely-discussed issue: Do the states that provide a relatively decent work environment end up paying a penalty in terms of their overall economic climate? For example, do states that rank high according to the WEI score poorly in terms of their overall growth rate, the pace at which new businesses are being formed in the state, or their rate of new job creation? In fact, we find that overall economic conditions in states with a high WEI rank are at least as favorable, if not somewhat more favorable, than those with low WEI rankings. Along with this, we also find that poverty rates in states with high WEI rankings are consistently lower than states with low WEI rankings.labor, work environment, business climate, decent work, poverty, job growth, economic growth, business start-up

Abelian geometric phase for a Dirac neutral particle in a Lorentz symmetry violation environment

We introduce a new term into the Dirac equation based on the Lorentz symmetry violation background in order to make a theoretical description of the relativistic quantum dynamics of a spin-half neutral particle, where the wave function of the neutral particle acquires a relativistic Abelian quantum phase given by the interaction between a fixed time-like 4-vector background and crossed electric and magnetic fields, which is analogous to the geometric phase obtained by Wei \textit{et al} [H. Wei, R. Han and X. Wei, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{75}, 2071 (1995)] for a spinless neutral particle with an induced electric dipole moment. We also discuss the flux dependence of energy levels of bound states analogous to the Aharonov-Bohm effect for bound states.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

On finite Morse index solutions of higher order fractional Lane-Emden equations

We classify finite Morse index solutions of the fractional Lane-Emden equation $(-\Delta)^{s} u=|u|^{p-1} u \ \ \ \mathbb{R}^n$ for $1<s<2$. For the local case, $s=1$ and $s=2$ this classification was done by Farina in [10] and Davila, Dupaigne, Wang and Wei in [8], respectively. Moreover, for the nonlocal case, $0<s<1$, finite Morse index solutions are classified by Davila, Dupaigne and Wei in [7].Comment: To appear in American Journal of Math. 19 page