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 $14/15+\epsilon$ and $1/2+\epsilon$. 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-$m$ approximation-resistant OCSPs accepting only a fraction $1 / (m/2)!$ of assignments. These results provide the first examples of approximation-resistant OCSPs subject only to P $\neq$ \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 $x$ and $y$ is ${\rm dep}(x,y) = \max\{C(x) - C(x \mid y), C(y) - C(y\mid x)\}$, where $C(\cdot)$ denotes the Kolmogorov complexity. It is shown that there exists a computable Kolmogorov extractor $f$ such that, for any two $n$-bit strings with complexity $s(n)$ and dependency $\alpha(n)$, it outputs a string of length $s(n)$ with complexity $s(n)- \alpha(n)$ 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 $f_1$ and $f_2$ such that ${\rm dep}(f_1(x,y), f_2(x,y)) \leq \beta(n)$ for all $n$-bit strings $x$ and $y$ with ${\rm dep}(x,y) \leq \alpha(n)$, then $\beta(n) \geq \alpha(n) - O(\log n)$

A framework for space-efficient string kernels

String kernels are typically used to compare genome-scale sequences whose length makes alignment impractical, yet their computation is based on data structures that are either space-inefficient, or incur large slowdowns. We show that a number of exact string kernels, like the $k$-mer kernel, the substrings kernels, a number of length-weighted kernels, the minimal absent words kernel, and kernels with Markovian corrections, can all be computed in $O(nd)$ time and in $o(n)$ bits of space in addition to the input, using just a $\mathtt{rangeDistinct}$ data structure on the Burrows-Wheeler transform of the input strings, which takes $O(d)$ time per element in its output. The same bounds hold for a number of measures of compositional complexity based on multiple value of $k$, like the $k$-mer profile and the $k$-th order empirical entropy, and for calibrating the value of $k$ using the data