Wage and employment effects of a wage norm : The Polish transition experience

Most transition countries used tax-supported wage norms in the early 1990's, as a part of their market liberalization programs. This paper analyses how a firm-level tax (or subsidy) on deviations from a pre-set wage norm may promote employment by rotating the labor demand curve perceived by the workers' union around the value of the norm. We derive the conditions such that it yields a positive employment effect. We test the effect of the norm on the wages on a sample of Polish firms in 1990 and 1991. The data support the role of the wage norm on the position of the perceived labor demand and the role of the tax rate on its slope.transition economies, labor market, unions, excess wage tax, employment

Field adjustments in transition economies : social transfers and the efficiency of public spending - a comparison with OECD countries

Despite a dramatic shift away from subsidies in the early years of transition, the countries of Central Europe still show signs of unsuccessful fiscal adjustment, insufficient deficit reduction, and loose spending policy. High social transfers and low efficiency of government spending remain two challenges of fiscal adjustment and long-term sustainability of budgetary policy choices. A cross-country regression analysis shows that the problems with high social-security outlays are largely the result of loose eligibility criteria (many pensions go to early retirees) under current state pay-as-you-go pension systems - and not so much to old populations or high replacement rates. The authors suggest that transition economies should strive for a real social consensus on the reform of future pension rights. The transition to a funded pension system could be financed by a combination of: government debt; proceeds from privatization; and efficiency gains from lowering and/or restructuring government spending in favor of infrastructure, retraining, and market-oriented tertiary education.Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,National Governance

Poverty risk and consumption smoothing abilities in Russia

This paper investigates to what extent Russian households have been able to protect their consumption against income shocks during the transition and in what manner the ability to smooth consumption is related to poverty risk. We use data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (1994-2004). Empirical analyses of such panels have often been based on differenced data in order to eliminate individual household effects. An innovative aspect of this study is that we model households smoothing behaviour by means of an Error Correction Mechanism (ECM); this model explicitly distinguishes between short and long run dynamics of consumption and income and thus better exploits the information in the level data. We find that households are only partially able to protect their consumption from income shocks and that income shocks have a smaller impact on food consumption than on non-food consumption. The results also suggest that the population is not homogeneous in terms of consumption smoothing abilities; partial estimations show that consumption smoothing ability improve as the living standard increases. However, below average consumption smoothing abilities are not always associated with higher poverty risk; rural households, who have a high poverty risk, manage to smooth food expenditures quite well, most likely because they have more opportunities to produce their own food. These exploratory results suggest that development and social protection policies should not only play a role in terms of poverty reduction but also influence households' abilities to manage risks.poverty; consumption smoothing; error correction model; Russia

ITERA: IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis

We present a new software tool to enable astronomers to easily compare observations of emission line ratios with those determined by photoionization and shock models, ITERA, the IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis. This tool can plot ratios of emission lines predicted by models and allows for comparison of observed line ratios against grids of these models selected from model libraries associated with the tool. We provide details of the libraries of standard photoionization and shock models available with ITERA, and, in addition, present three example emission line ratio diagrams covering a range of wavelengths to demonstrate the capabilities of ITERA. ITERA, and associated libraries, is available from \url{http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.html}Comment: Accepted for New Astronomy, 3 figures. ITERA tool available to download from http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.htm

Osteoblasts Clock in for Their Day Job

The proteins encoded by clock genes regulate circadian variations of various cellular functions. In this issue of Cell, Fu, Karsenty, and colleagues (Fu et al., 2005) demonstrate that clock genes control the proliferation of osteoblasts, the cells that promote growth of bone. These findings indicate that the homeostatic regulation of bone mass is subject to circadian control

Job-training programmes with low completion rates: The case of Projoven-Peru

Projoven is an ongoing Peruvian youth job-training programme started in 1996and conducted in successive waves or ‘public calls’. The programme has twophases of instruction: i) three months of classroom training, followed by ii) threemonths of on-the-job training internship. From 1997 to 2007, less than 60% ofregistrants completed both phases. This paper estimates the effectiveness ofProjoven’s sixth Public Call, in terms of overall and formal employment andwage outcomes, while accounting for the presence of trainees with partialinstruction. Four groups are compared pairwise: the control group, the dropoutgroup with only classroom training, the dropout group with classroom trainingand internship placement, and the group completing the full programme. Ourestimations account for selection effects and the potential endogeneity of trainingcompletion. We find that in terms of overall and formal employment, theprogramme yields returns only in the short run and conditioned on internshipcompletion. The programme seems to increase trainee wages, but these effectsdiminish over time. Projoven is relatively more effective for individuals with nowork experience prior to enrolment.education, training and the labour market;