Employer behavior when workers can unionize

Unionization imposes substantial costs on employers. This paper develops a model that recognizes that, as a result, employers will set wages and employment taking into account the effect of their decisions on workers' incentives to organize. This model of employer behavior allows us to address two questions jointly: What determines which firms become unionized? And what are the consequences of unionization for employment and wages in nonunion firms? The implications of the model depart significantly from those of previous work, which either ignored employers' strategic behavior, or treated these questions in isolation

Generating Navigable Semantic Maps from Social Sciences Corpora

It is now commonplace to observe that we are facing a deluge of online information. Researchers have of course long acknowledged the potential value of this information since digital traces make it possible to directly observe, describe and analyze social facts, and above all the co-evolution of ideas and communities over time. However, most online information is expressed through text, which means it is not directly usable by machines, since computers require structured, organized and typed information in order to be able to manipulate it. Our goal is thus twofold: 1. Provide new natural language processing techniques aiming at automatically extracting relevant information from texts, especially in the context of social sciences, and connect these pieces of information so as to obtain relevant socio-semantic networks; 2. Provide new ways of exploring these socio-semantic networks, thanks to tools allowing one to dynamically navigate these networks, de-construct and re-construct them interactively, from different points of view following the needs expressed by domain experts.Comment: in Digital Humanities 2015, Jun 2015, Sydney, Australia. Actes de la Conf{\'e}rence Digital Humanities 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.421

Threat of unionization and nonunion employment.

If nonunion employers set both wages and employment strategically to forestall unionization, the threat of unionization, despite raising wages, increases employment above competitive levels, in contrast with the prediction of standard models.Threat of unionization; Employment determination;

EMPLOYER BEHAVIOR WHEN WORKERS CAN UNIONIZE

Unionization imposes substantial costs on employers. This paper develops a model that recognizes that, as a result, employers will set wages and employment taking into account the effect of their decisions on workers' incentives to organize. This model of employer behavior allows us to address two questions jointly: What determines which firms become unionized? And what are the consequences of unionization for employment and wages in nonunion firms? The implications of the model depart significantly from those of previous work, which either ignored employers' strategic behavior, or treated these questions in isolation.

WHAT DO UNIONS DO (TO NONUNION WORKERS)?

This paper develops a model of wage and employment determination under the threat of unionization. The model shows that this threat generally leads nonunion firms to pay higher than competitive wages and to set a level of employment equal to or higher than the competitive employment level. This result holds independently of the model used to represent union-management bargaining, as long as it exhibits an intuitively appealing trade-off between wages and employment (monotonicity). The right-to-manage and the Nash-bargaining models are shown to be monotone, so the result extends to the most commonly used models of unionmanagement bargaining.

The economics of union organization : efficiency, information and profitability.

This article presents a game theoretical model of union organization that highlights the role played by efficiency and asymmetric information as determinants of unionization and questions commonly held assumptions about the effect of firm profitability on unionization decisions. In the model, employers set wages taking into account the effect of their choices on workers' incentives to unionize. As a result of employers' strategic wage setting, collective bargaining emerges in equilibrium only if it increases surplus or if there is asymmetric information about the consequences of unionization. While unionization is usually assumed to be more likely in more profitable firms, the model shows that the probability of unionization will be higher in firms with lower rents. It also shows that the union wage premium and unionization will tend to be negatively correlated.Unionization; Asymmetric information; Union efficiency; Profitability;

Entities as topic labels: Improving topic interpretability and evaluability combining Entity Linking and Labeled LDA

In order to create a corpus exploration method providing topics that are easier to interpret than standard LDA topic models, here we propose combining two techniques called Entity linking and Labeled LDA. Our method identifies in an ontology a series of descriptive labels for each document in a corpus. Then it generates a specific topic for each label. Having a direct relation between topics and labels makes interpretation easier; using an ontology as background knowledge limits label ambiguity. As our topics are described with a limited number of clear-cut labels, they promote interpretability, and this may help quantitative evaluation. We illustrate the potential of the approach by applying it in order to define the most relevant topics addressed by each party in the European Parliament's fifth mandate (1999-2004).Comment: in Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2016, Krako

A viral system to optimise the daily drayage problem

The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organisation of the drayage movements. Drayage in intermodal container terminals involves the pick up or delivery of containers at customer locations, and the main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. This paper focuses on a new approach to tackle the daily drayage problem by the use of viral system (VS). VS is a novel bio-inspired approach that makes use of a virus-infection biological analogy that is producing very satisfactory results when dealing with complex problems with huge feasibility region.Unión Europea TEC2013-47286-C3-3-

When cheaper is better: fee determination in the market for equity mutual funds

In this paper, we develop a model of the market for equity mutual funds that captures three key characteristics of this market. First, there is competition among funds. Second, fund managers' ability is not observed by investors before making their investment decisions. And third, some investors do not make optimal use of all available information. The main results of the paper are that 1) price competition is compatible with positive mark-ups in equilibrium; and 2) worse-performing funds set fees that are greater or equal than those set by better-performing funds. These predictions are supported by available empirical evidence

Does X(3872)X(3872) count?

The question on whether or not weakly bound states should be effectively incorporated in a hadronic representation of the QCD partition function is addressed by analyzing the example of the $X(3872)$, a resonance close to the $D\bar D^*$ threshold which has been suggested as an example of a loosely bound molecule. This can be decided by studying the $D \bar D^*$ scattering phase-shifts in the $J^{PC}=1^{++}$ channel and their contribution to the level density in the continuum, which also gives information on its abundance in a hot medium. In this work, it is shown that, in a purely molecular picture, the bound state contribution cancels the continuum, resulting in a null occupation number density at finite temperature, which implies the $X(3872)$ does not count below the Quark-Gluon Plasma crossover ($T \sim 150$MeV). However, if a non-zero $c \bar c$ component is present in the $X(3872)$ wave function such cancellation does not occur for temperatures above $T\gtrsim 250$MeV.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. XVII International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy and Structur