Social protection of non-standard work in Greece

This brief paper aims to describe key aspects of employment in Greece, to provide some information on levels of, and trends in, non-standard work in Greece, to elaborate on the nature and characteristics of different types of such work, to analyse existing social policies to protect the workers concerned, and to speculate on future developments.

The wage effects from the use of personal contacts as hiring channels

It has been argued that the use of personal networks in the hiring process has a positive influence on the wages of referred individuals. However, the value of recommendations to the employer varies according to the type of vacancy to be filled and the provider of information on job applicants. Using data from a manufacturing firm, which combine wages from the personnel files and job-histories from interviews with the workers, it is shown that new recruits receive a higher starting wage when recommended to the job by an individual who has direct experience of their productivity. On the contrary, the use of referrals from friends and relatives has no effect on the starting wage and may even be negatively related to wages of workers in unskilled jobs.recruitment; networks; employee referrals; Egypt

Estimating the distributional effects of mortgage interest tax relief in Europe

This paper attempts to contribute to the analysis of mortgage interest tax relief from the perspective of the economics of social policy. It begins with a brief discussion of fiscal welfare, highlighting key contributions within this particular intellectual tradition. It then contrasts this largely critical approach to the standard, more neutral, treatment of mortgage interest tax relief in the housing literature. Finally, the paper draws on both approaches to present on-going research on the distributional effects of mortgage interest tax relief in Europe.tax relief, inequality, microsimulation

Statistical properties of the localization measure in a finite-dimensional model of the quantum kicked rotator

We study the quantum kicked rotator in the classically fully chaotic regime $K=10$ and for various values of the quantum parameter $k$ using Izrailev's $N$-dimensional model for various $N \le 3000$, which in the limit $N \rightarrow \infty$ tends to the exact quantized kicked rotator. By numerically calculating the eigenfunctions in the basis of the angular momentum we find that the localization length ${\cal L}$ for fixed parameter values has a certain distribution, in fact its inverse is Gaussian distributed, in analogy and in connection with the distribution of finite time Lyapunov exponents of Hamilton systems. However, unlike the case of the finite time Lyapunov exponents, this distribution is found to be independent of $N$, and thus survives the limit $N=\infty$. This is different from the tight-binding model of Anderson localization. The reason is that the finite bandwidth approximation of the underlying Hamilton dynamical system in the Shepelyansky picture (D.L. Shepelyansky, {\em Phys. Rev. Lett.} {\bf 56}, 677 (1986)) does not apply rigorously. This observation explains the strong fluctuations in the scaling laws of the kicked rotator, such as e.g. the entropy localization measure as a function of the scaling parameter $\Lambda={\cal L}/N$, where $\cal L$ is the theoretical value of the localization length in the semiclassical approximation. These results call for a more refined theory of the localization length in the quantum kicked rotator and in similar Floquet systems, where we must predict not only the mean value of the inverse of the localization length $\cal L$ but also its (Gaussian) distribution, in particular the variance. In order to complete our studies we numerically analyze the related behavior of finite time Lyapunov exponents in the standard map and of the 2$\times$2 transfer matrix formalism. This paper is extending our recent work.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures (accepted for publication in Physical Review E). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1301.418