2,483 research outputs found
Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical predictions have rarely been tested. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protections by U.S. state courts over the last three decades to evaluate the link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Longitudinal Business Database, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protections reduce employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, analysis of plant-level data provides evidence of capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity following the introduction of wrongful-discharge protections. This last result is potentially quite important, suggesting that mandated employment protections reduce productive efficiency as theory would suggest. However, our analysis also presents some puzzles including, most significantly, evidence of strong employment growth following adoption of dismissal protections. In light of these puzzles, we read our findings as suggestive but tentative.Dismissal Costs, Employment Fluctuations, Entry and Exit, Labor Productivity, TFP, Entrepreneurship.
Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical predictions have rarely been tested. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protections by U.S. state courts over the last three decades to evaluate the link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Longitudinal Business Database, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protections reduce employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, analysis of plant-level data provides evidence of capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity following the introduction of wrongful-discharge protections. This last result is potentially quite important, suggesting that mandated employment protections reduce productive efficiency as theory would suggest. However, our analysis also presents some puzzles including, most significantly, evidence of strong employment growth following adoption of dismissal protections. In light of these puzzles, we read our findings as suggestive but tentative.
AIOps for a Cloud Object Storage Service
With the growing reliance on the ubiquitous availability of IT systems and
services, these systems become more global, scaled, and complex to operate. To
maintain business viability, IT service providers must put in place reliable
and cost efficient operations support. Artificial Intelligence for IT
Operations (AIOps) is a promising technology for alleviating operational
complexity of IT systems and services. AIOps platforms utilize big data,
machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to enhance IT
operations with proactive actionable dynamic insight.
In this paper we share our experience applying the AIOps approach to a
production cloud object storage service to get actionable insights into
system's behavior and health. We describe a real-life production cloud scale
service and its operational data, present the AIOps platform we have created,
and show how it has helped us resolving operational pain points.Comment: 5 page
Options for upgrading the intensity of the CERN lead pre-injector ion source
CERN's heavy ion pre-injector has been in service since 1994, providing lead ions for fixed target collisions at 177 GeV per nucleon in the SPS. In the LHC era, heavy ion collisions require an increase in the beam brightness, compared to the present injector system of Linac 3, Proton Synchrotron Booster and the Proton Synchrotron. Stacking and cooling ions in a Low Energy Ion Ring should find the largest part of this increase. However, further improvements can be envisaged by upgrading the pre-injector and source. The performance and limitations of the present source and Linac 3 will be discussed, and options for increasing the source brightness will be presented. These options consist of upgrades of the ECR Source to higher frequencies, or its replacement with a Laser Ion Source
Geometrically Induced Gauge Structure on Manifolds Embedded in a Higher Dimensional Space
We explain in a context different from that of Maraner the formalism for
describing motion of a particle, under the influence of a confining potential,
in a neighbourhood of an n-dimensional curved manifold M^n embedded in a
p-dimensional Euclidean space R^p with p >= n+2. The effective Hamiltonian on
M^n has a (generally non-Abelian) gauge structure determined by geometry of
M^n. Such a gauge term is defined in terms of the vectors normal to M^n, and
its connection is called the N-connection. In order to see the global effect of
this type of connections, the case of M^1 embedded in R^3 is examined, where
the relation of an integral of the gauge potential of the N-connection (i.e.,
the torsion) along a path in M^1 to the Berry's phase is given through Gauss
mapping of the vector tangent to M^1. Through the same mapping in the case of
M^1 embedded in R^p, where the normal and the tangent quantities are exchanged,
the relation of the N-connection to the induced gauge potential on the
(p-1)-dimensional sphere S^{p-1} (p >= 3) found by Ohnuki and Kitakado is
concretely established. Further, this latter which has the monopole-like
structure is also proved to be gauge-equivalent to the spin-connection of
S^{p-1}. Finally, by extending formally the fundamental equations for M^n to
infinite dimensional case, the present formalism is applied to the field theory
that admits a soliton solution. The resultant expression is in some respects
different from that of Gervais and Jevicki.Comment: 52 pages, PHYZZX. To be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.
Parameter identification in a semilinear hyperbolic system
We consider the identification of a nonlinear friction law in a
one-dimensional damped wave equation from additional boundary measurements.
Well-posedness of the governing semilinear hyperbolic system is established via
semigroup theory and contraction arguments. We then investigte the inverse
problem of recovering the unknown nonlinear damping law from additional
boundary measurements of the pressure drop along the pipe. This coefficient
inverse problem is shown to be ill-posed and a variational regularization
method is considered for its stable solution. We prove existence of minimizers
for the Tikhonov functional and discuss the convergence of the regularized
solutions under an approximate source condition. The meaning of this condition
and some arguments for its validity are discussed in detail and numerical
results are presented for illustration of the theoretical findings
Lattice sites of ion-implanted Li in diamond
Published in: Appl. Phys. Lett. 66 (1995) 2733-2735
citations recorded in [Science Citation Index]
Abstract: Radioactive Li ions were implanted into natural IIa diamonds at temperatures between 100 K and 900 K. Emission channelling patterns of a-particles emitted in the nuclear decay of 8Li (t1/2 = 838 ms) were measured and, from a comparison with calculated emission channelling and blocking effects from Monte Carlo simulations, the lattice sites taken up by the Li ions were quantitatively determined. A fraction of 40(5)% of the implanted Li ions were found to be located on tetrahedral interstitial lattice sites, and 17(5)% on substitutional sites. The fractions of implanted Li on the two lattice sites showed no change with temperature, indicating that Li diffusion does not take place within the time window of our measurements.
Skyrme Crystal In A Two-Dimensional Electron Gas
The ground state of a two-dimensional electron gas at Landau level filling
factors near is a Skyrme crystal with long range order in the
positions and orientations of the topologically and electrically charged
elementary excitations of the ferromagnetic ground state. The lowest
energy Skyrme crystal is a square lattice with opposing postures for
topological excitations on opposite sublattices. The filling factor dependence
of the electron spin-polarization, calculated for the square lattice Skyrme
crystal, is in excellent agreement with recent experiments.Comment: 3 pages, latex, 3 figures available upon request from
[email protected]
In-plane optical spectral weight transfer in optimally doped BiSrCaCuO
We examine the redistribution of the in-plane optical spectral weight in the
normal and superconducting state in tri-layer \bbb (Bi2223) near optimal doping
( = 110 K) on a single crystal via infrared reflectivity and spectroscopic
ellipsometry. We report the temperature dependence of the low-frequency
integrated spectral weight for different values of the cutoff
energy . Two different model-independent analyses consistently show
that for = 1 eV, which is below the charge transfer gap,
increases below , implying the lowering of the kinetic
energy of the holes. This is opposite to the BCS scenario, but it follows the
same trend observed in the bi-layer compound \bb (Bi2212). The size of this
effect is larger in Bi2223 than in Bi2212, approximately scaling with the
critical temperature. In the normal state, the temperature dependence of
is close to up to 300 K
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