Lead Miners Earnings in 19th Century Allendale

This paper uses the records of the Beaumont/Blackett lead mining concerns in Allendale to examine the earnings for lead miners in the early 1860's. The paper matches two parts of the historical record, the Bargain books and the quarterly financial accounts, to give a more complete picture of the earnings of this group of workers than has previously been done. The paper also examines aspects of the setting of the rates in the bargains by the mine owner's agents

Detailed study of B037 based on {\sl HST} images

B037 is of interest because it is both the most luminous and the most highly reddened cluster known in M31. Images of deep observations and of highly spatial resolutions with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the {\sl HST} firstly show that this cluster is crossed by a dust lane. Photometric data in the F606W and F814W filters obtained in this paper provide that, colors of ($\rm {F606W-F814W}$) in the dust lane are redder $\sim 0.4$ mags than ones in the other regions of B037. The {\sl HST} images show that, this dust lane seems to be contained in B037, not from the M31 disk or the Milky Way. As we know, the formation of dust requires gas with a rather high metallicity. However, B037 has a low metallicity to be $\rm [Fe/H]=-1.07\pm 0.20$. So, it seems improbable that the observed dust lane is physically associated with B037. It is clear that the origin of this dust lane is worthy of future study. In addition, based on these images, we present the precise variation of ellipticity and position angle, and of surface brightness profile, and determine the structural parameters of B037 by fitting a single-mass isotropic King model. In the F606W filter, we derive the best-fitting scale radius, r_0=0.56\pm0.02\arcsec~(=2.16\pm0.08~\rm{pc}), a tidal radius, r_t=8.6\pm0.4\arcsec~(=33.1\pm1.5~\rm{pc}), and a concentration index $c=\log (r_t/r_0)=1.19\pm0.02$. In the F814W filter, we derive r_0=0.56\pm0.01\arcsec~(=2.16\pm0.04~\rm{pc}), r_t=8.9\pm0.3\arcsec~(=34.3\pm1.2~\rm{pc}), and $c=\log (r_t/r_0)=1.20\pm0.01$. The extinction-corrected central surface brightness is $\mu_0=13.53\pm 0.03~{\rm mag~arcsec^{-2}}$ in the F606W filter, and $12.85\pm 0.03~{\rm mag~arcsec^{-2}}$ in the F814W filter, respectively.Comment: Accepted for Publication in RAA, 13 pages, 5 figures and 7 table

Specific Human Capital Accumulation and Job Match Quality – Implications for Measuring Returns to Tenure

This paper uses the theoretical argument presented by Stevens (2003) that suggests that the measured returns to tenure will unambiguously be biased downwards. We illustrate this effect for data from a UK internal labour market using the counterfactual methodology outlined by DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996). Finally we argue that Stevens’s theory offers a possible explanation for the apparent puzzle presented by Medoff and Abraham (1980) who find that their estimated coefficient on tenure did not fall when direct measures of productivity were introduced into the wage equation

Worker Absenteeism: A Study of Contagion effects

A number of recent studies have suggested that workers’ attendance as well as their absence, could have importance for the way in which firms’ design remuneration contracts, see Chatterji and Tilley (2000) and Skåtun (2002). One aspect of this is that, since worker absenteeism is in large part due to illness, if contracts impose costs on workers which induce them to attend work when ill this could result in the illness being more readily communicated to other workers with associated effects on productivity. This paper seeks to quantify such contagion effects by examining a personnel dataset which allows us to track daily absence decisions of a group of industrial workers employed in the same factory

The Riddle of the Sands? Incentives and Labour Contracts on Archaeological digs in Northern Syria in the 1930s

This paper analyses data on the daily work decisions of archaeological workers on a Syrian archaeological dig in 1938. The remuneration contract that these workers faced involved a fixed component and a stochastic component termed “bakshish” which were daily payments for small finds that the worker made on the dig. The value of these finds we argue represent transitory movements in the worker’s wage which can be used to examine intertemporal labour supply behaviour

Things Can Only get Worse? An Empirical Examination of the Peter Principle.

The results reported in this paper suggest the possible operation of the Peter Principle in a large hierarchical financial sector firm. This result holds even after we allow for variation in optimal effort over stages in the hierarchy. The method also allows us to attribute the contributory factors for the observed fall in performance after a promotion. It appears that approximately 2/3 of the fall is due to the Peter Principle and 1/3 due to lessening incentives.We acknowledge helpful comments received from Hans Hvide, and session participants at the 2005 Scottish Economic Society Conference where and earlier version of this paper was presented