831 research outputs found
The 2004 Global Labor Survey: Workplace Institutions and Practices Around the World
The 2004 Global Labor Survey (GLS) is an Internet-based survey that seeks to measure de facto labor practices in countries around the world, covering issues such as freedom of association, the regulation of work contracts, employee benefits and the prevalence of collective bargaining. To find out about de facto practices, the GLS invited labor practitioners, ranging from union officials and activists to professors of labor law and industrial relations, to report on conditions in their country. Over 1,500 persons responded, which allowed us to create indices of practices in ten broad areas for 33 countries. The GLS' focus on de facto labor practices contrasts with recent studies of de jure labor regulations (Botero et al., 2004) and with more limited efforts to measure labor practices as part of surveys of economic freedom (Fraser Institute) and competitiveness (World Economic Forum). Although our pool of respondents differs greatly from the conservative foundations and business leaders who contribute respectively to the Fraser Institute and World Economic Forum reports, the GLS and the labor market components of the economic freedom and competitiveness measures give similar pictures of labor practices across countries. This similarity across respondents with different economic interests and ideological perspectives suggests that they are all reporting on labor market realities in a relatively unbiased way. As a broad summary statement, the GLS shows that practices favorable to workers are more prevalent in countries with high levels of income per capita; are associated with less income inequality; are unrelated to aggregate growth rates; but are modestly positively associated with unemployment.
The 2004 Global Labor Survey : Workplace Institutions and Practices Around the World
The 2004 Global Labor Survey (GLS) is an Internet-based survey that seeks to measure de facto labor practices in countries around the world, covering issues such as freedom of association, the regulation of work contracts, employee benefits and the prevalence of collective bargaining. To find out about de facto practices, the GLS invited labor practitioners, ranging from union officials and activists to professors of labor law and industrial relations, to report on conditions in their country. Over 1,500 persons responded, which allowed us to create indices of practices in ten broad areas for 33 countries. The GLS' focus on de facto labor practices contrasts with recent studies of de jure labor regulations (Botero et al., 2004) and with more limited efforts to measure labor practices as part of surveys of economic freedom (Fraser Institute) and competitiveness (World Economic Forum). Although our pool of respondents differs greatly from the conservative foundations and business leaders who contribute respectively to the Fraser Institute and World Economic Forum reports, the GLS and the labor market components of the economic freedom and competitiveness measures give similar pictures of labor practices across countries. This similarity across respondents with different economic interests and ideological perspectives suggests that they are all reporting on labor market realities in a relatively unbiased way. As a broad summary statement, the GLS shows that practices favorable to workers are more prevalent in countries with high levels of income per capita; are associated with less income inequality; are unrelated to aggregate growth rates; but are modestly positively associated with unemployment.Labor Survey, industrial relation
Host Country Financial Development and MNC Activity
We present evidence that the level of financial development in FDI recipient countries systematically aects the spatial distribution of multinational corporations' (MNCs) sales. Using detailed proprietary survey data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on US multinational activity abroad, we find that stronger financial development in the host country has a negative effect on the share of MNC affiliate sales that remain in the host country, indicating a reduced propensity towards horizontal FDI. Conversely, the share of affiliate sales that is re-exported to third-country destinations increases, suggesting an increased propensity towards export-platform FDI. We provide a three-country model with heterogenous firms that rationalizes these observations : More financially developed host countries foster entry by domestic firms, making the local market more competitive for MNC products. This leads MNCs to orient their affiliates away from servicing the local market towards third-country markets instead.
Improved Lower Bounds for Locally Decodable Codes and Private Information Retrieval
We prove new lower bounds for locally decodable codes and private information
retrieval. We show that a 2-query LDC encoding n-bit strings over an l-bit
alphabet, where the decoder only uses b bits of each queried position of the
codeword, needs code length m = exp(Omega(n/(2^b Sum_{i=0}^b {l choose i})))
Similarly, a 2-server PIR scheme with an n-bit database and t-bit queries,
where the user only needs b bits from each of the two l-bit answers, unknown to
the servers, satisfies t = Omega(n/(2^b Sum_{i=0}^b {l choose i})). This
implies that several known PIR schemes are close to optimal. Our results
generalize those of Goldreich et al. who proved roughly the same bounds for
linear LDCs and PIRs. Like earlier work by Kerenidis and de Wolf, our classical
lower bounds are proved using quantum computational techniques. In particular,
we give a tight analysis of how well a 2-input function can be computed from a
quantum superposition of both inputs.Comment: 12 pages LaTeX, To appear in ICALP '0
Fourier-based Function Secret Sharing with General Access Structure
Function secret sharing (FSS) scheme is a mechanism that calculates a
function f(x) for x in {0,1}^n which is shared among p parties, by using
distributed functions f_i:{0,1}^n -> G, where G is an Abelian group, while the
function f:{0,1}^n -> G is kept secret to the parties. Ohsawa et al. in 2017
observed that any function f can be described as a linear combination of the
basis functions by regarding the function space as a vector space of dimension
2^n and gave new FSS schemes based on the Fourier basis. All existing FSS
schemes are of (p,p)-threshold type. That is, to compute f(x), we have to
collect f_i(x) for all the distributed functions. In this paper, as in the
secret sharing schemes, we consider FSS schemes with any general access
structure. To do this, we observe that Fourier-based FSS schemes by Ohsawa et
al. are compatible with linear secret sharing scheme. By incorporating the
techniques of linear secret sharing with any general access structure into the
Fourier-based FSS schemes, we show Fourier-based FSS schemes with any general
access structure.Comment: 12 page
On the NP-Hardness of Approximating Ordering Constraint Satisfaction Problems
We show improved NP-hardness of approximating Ordering Constraint
Satisfaction Problems (OCSPs). For the two most well-studied OCSPs, Maximum
Acyclic Subgraph and Maximum Betweenness, we prove inapproximability of
and .
An OCSP is said to be approximation resistant if it is hard to approximate
better than taking a uniformly random ordering. We prove that the Maximum
Non-Betweenness Problem is approximation resistant and that there are width-
approximation-resistant OCSPs accepting only a fraction of
assignments. These results provide the first examples of
approximation-resistant OCSPs subject only to P \NP
The 2004 Global Labour Survey: Working Institution and Practices around the World
Also NBER Working Paper Series, No 11598</p
Impossibility of independence amplification in Kolmogorov complexity theory
The paper studies randomness extraction from sources with bounded
independence and the issue of independence amplification of sources, using the
framework of Kolmogorov complexity. The dependency of strings and is
, where
denotes the Kolmogorov complexity. It is shown that there exists a
computable Kolmogorov extractor such that, for any two -bit strings with
complexity and dependency , it outputs a string of length
with complexity conditioned by any one of the input
strings. It is proven that the above are the optimal parameters a Kolmogorov
extractor can achieve. It is shown that independence amplification cannot be
effectively realized. Specifically, if (after excluding a trivial case) there
exist computable functions and such that for all -bit strings and with , then
A High Quartets Distance Construction
Given two binary trees on N labeled leaves, the quartet distance between the trees is the number of disagreeing quartets. By permuting the leaves at random, the expected quartet distance between the two trees is 23(N4) . However, no strongly explicit construction reaching this bound asymptotically was known. We consider complete, balanced binary trees on N=2n leaves, labeled by n bits long sequences. Ordering the leaves in one tree by the prefix order, and in the other tree by the suffix order, we show that the resulting quartet distance is (23+o(1))(N4) , and it always exceeds the 23(N4) bound
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