Unionization and cost of production: compensation, productivity, and factor-use effects

A demonstration that unionization can affect cost of production through increases in compensation, through shifts in technologies, and through deviations from the least-cost combination of inputs (the factor-use effect).Labor productivity ; Wages ; Labor unions

Metropolitan wage differentials: can Cleveland still compete?

A look at the Cleveland metropolitan labor market as a point of comparison to highlight how labor costs in a major industrial city fare with respect to other U.S. cities. ; A look at the Cleveland metropolitan labor market as a point of comparison to highlight how labor costs in a major industrial city fare with respect to other U.S. cities.Wages ; Cleveland (Ohio) ; Urban economics

School reform, school size, and student achievement

An estimation of the effect of school size on student achievement, with the results suggesting that market-based school reform could enhance student performance if the reform reduced school size.Education

Corporate Influence in World Bank Lending

The World Bank withholds loan disbursements in order to build a reputation for enforcing conditionality, and multinational firms lobby for these funds to be released. Using data drawn from World Bank reports, we find evidence that (1) participation by Fortune 500 multinational corporations as project contractors and (2) investments by these firms are associated with disbursements that are unjustified by project performance. In addition, these measures of corporate interest are associated with inflated project evaluations. These effects are limited to multinational corporations headquartered in the United States or Japan, suggesting that the influence of private actors depends on access to particular national policy networks. In contrast to the evidence of corporate influence, we find no consistent evidence of geopolitical influences

Wage and Employment Adjustment in Local Labor Markets

Eberts and Stone have created dynamic models of labor supply and demand behavior for metropolitan labor markets. They use these models to simulate wage, employment, and personal income responses to local economic change, including changes brought about by governmental policy.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1089/thumbnail.jp

Using Information Systems as a Unifying Influence in an Integrated Business Curriculum

The integrated business curriculum of a College of Business at a public university in the northwestern United States uses semester projects and thematic examples to demonstrate that most business problems transcend functional areas. Information systems have proven to be especially useful for this purpose. The focus of the article is to describe the integrated business curriculum in general and, more specifically, the role of information systems as an integrative force within this curriculum. Specifically, the use of information systems models to develop thematic slides for reference purposes during class lectures and integrative information system student projects are described. Examples of these thematic slides and integrative projects are provided. Also presented are recommendations regarding how these techniques can be used in information systems courses

Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes

This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of individual merit pay systems for teachers on student achievement, and it presents new empirical results based on a system established within a collective bargaining environment. While many merit pay systems have been established in school districts across the U.S., very little empirical evidence concerning their influence on student achievement exists. A natural experiment arose in a county in which one high school piloted a merit pay system that rewarded student retention and student evaluations of teachers while another comparable high school maintained a traditional compensation system. A difference-in-differences analysis implies that merit pay had no effect on grade point averages, reduced the percentage of students who dropped out of courses, reduced average daily attendance, and increased the percentage of students who failed. The outcomes illustrate the difficulty of instituting individual merit pay in schools. The goal was to increase student retention. A student was considered to be retained in a class if the student was present during a randomly selected day of the last week of classes. The system worked by this measure because the school experienced a significant reduction in course noncompleters. However it is not clear that this measure was correlated with student achievement or even average attendance, and indeed, neither of these outcomes were improved

Adverse selection and growth under IMF programs

The dominant approach to studying the effects of IMF programs has emphasized moral hazard, but we find that adverse selection has more impressive effects. We propose a novel strategic selection model to study the growth effects of IMF programs, which allows for the possibility of adverse selection. We find that adverse selection occurs: the countries that are most interested in participating in IMF programs are the least likely to have favorable growth outcomes. Controlling for this selection effect, we find that countries benefit from IMF programs on average in terms of higher growth rates, but that some countries benefit from participation, while others are harmed. Moral hazard predicts that long-term users of Fund resources benefit least from participating in programs, while adverse selection predicts the opposite. Contrary to previous findings, we find that IMF programs have more successful growth performance among long-term users than among short-term users.Governmen

UCP1 is an essential mediator of the effects of methionine restriction on energy balance but not insulin sensitivity

© FASEB. Dietary methionine restriction (MR) by 80%increases energy expenditure (EE), reduces adiposity, and improves insulin sensitivity. We propose that the MRinduced increase in EE limits fat deposition by increasing sympathetic nervous system-dependent remodeling of white adipose tissue and increasing uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) expression in both white and brown adipose tissue. In independent assessments of the role of UCP1 as a mediator of MR\u27s effects on EE and insulin sensitivity, EE did not differ between wild-type (WT) and Ucp1-/- mice on the control diet, butMR increased EE by 31%and reduced adiposity by 25% in WT mice. In contrast, MR failed to increase EE or reduce adiposity in Ucp1-/- mice. However, MR was able to increase overall insulin sensitivity by 2.2-fold in both genotypes. Housing temperatures used to minimize (28°C) or increase (23°C) sympathetic nervous system activity revealed temperature-independent effects of the diet on EE. Metabolomics analysis showed that genotypic and dietary effects on white adipose tissue remodeling resulted in profound increases in fatty acid metabolism within this tissue. These findings establish that UCP1 is required for the MR-induced increase in EE but not insulin sensitivity and suggest that diet-induced improvements in insulin sensitivity are not strictly derived from dietary effects on energy balance

Massive Spin-2 States as the Origin of the Top Quark Forward-Backward Asymmetry

We show that the anomalously large top quark forward-backward asymmetry observed by CDF and D\O\, can naturally be accommodated in models with flavor-violating couplings of a new massive spin-2 state to quarks. Regardless of its origin, the lowest-order couplings of a spin-2 boson to fermions are analogous to the coupling of the graviton to energy/momentum, leading to strong sensitivity of the effects associated with its virtual exchange to the energy scales at hand. Precisely due to this fact, the observed dependence of the asymmetry on the $t\bar t$ invariant mass fits nicely into the proposed framework. In particular, we find a vast parameter space which can lead to the central value for the observed forward-backward asymmetry in the high mass bin, while being in accord with all of the existing experimental constraints.Comment: added discussion of differential observables at the LHC, matches version accepted for publication in JHE