The deterrent effect of voting against minarets: identity utility and foreigners' location choice

This paper uses the vote on the Swiss minaret initiative as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners' location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity points and administrative data on the population of foreigners, we find that the probability of their moving to a municipality that unexpectedly expressed strong reservations decreases initially by about 60 percent. The effect levels off over a period of about 5 months. Consistent with a reduction in the identity utility for immigrants in general, the reaction is not confined to Muslims, whereby high-skilled foreigners seem to be most sensitive to the newly revealed reservations

Law Enforcement Expenditures and Crime Rates in Canadian Municipalities: A Statistical Analysis of How Law Enforcement Expenditures Impact Municipal Crime Rates in Canada

This paper examines what impact law enforcement expenditures have on municipal crime rates. An analysis of 65 municipalities representing nine provinces across Canada was conducted using data collected from the Police Resources in Canada reports from 1997 to 2007 and Census data from 2001 and 2006. The findings reveal that although a significant absolute relationship between expenditures and crime rates exists, there is no indication that law enforcement expenditures have an impact of statistical significance on crime rates

Implementing the Systematic Collection of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Information in a Community Mental Health Setting

BACKGROUND: Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) information is becoming part of client demographic information collected in many healthcare settings. Inclusion of these data with regularly collected demographic information is becoming mandatory for compliance with federal programs. Collecting SOGI information is not always easy to implement and requires customization to a particular healthcare institution’s processes. METHODS: This quality improvement (QI) project included establishing SOGI questions in a standardized format, client surveys for feedback, an educational intervention with staff, and simple quantitative analysis with t tests. IMPLEMENTATION: This QI project used the Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) method of planning and implementing change. The SOGI questions were introduced at a single outpatient mental health clinic of a statewide private, not-for-profit agency in the southeastern United States. This project consisted of four complete PDSA cycles, with unique changes to the collection process between each. These included informational statements on client forms, ongoing supervised and unsupervised data collection at the clinic, and a staff training regarding both the collection of SOGI data and serving the LGBTQ community in outpatient care. RESULTS: PDSA Cycle 3 to PDSA Cycle 4, which consisted of an education intervention for staff, showed the most consistent t-statistics. All questions have effects going in the appropriate direction and three results were statistically significant with p values < 0.05. These results indicate that the staff training was successful in improving the client experience answering SOGI questions. The pilot program established an effective model for implementing SOGI questions in this setting and will gradually be expanded to local clinics, then to the entire state-wide agency.Doctor of Nursing Practic

Women Leaving the Playpen: The Emancipating Role of Female Suffrage

We study how political empowerment affected womenâEurotms emancipation as reflected in their life choices. The staggered introduction of female suffrage in Swiss states allows us to exploit the variation in the age at which women were exposed to the right to vote to estimate the differences in life choices between women who were socialised in a world with politically empowered women and those who were socialised before. Our empirical findings document that early exposure to female suffrage increased female labour force participation, weakened marital bonds and motivated human capital investment

Gender norms and income misreporting within households

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same individual and their partner. We demonstrate that individuals misreport incomes in surveys to comply with the male breadwinner norm. The male breadwinner norm does, however, not affect real labor market decisions around this margin. The resulting survey bias leads to a considerable overestimation of policy relevant measures like the gender wage gap

Tax-induced Mobility: Evidence from a Foreigners' Tax Scheme in Switzerland

We study location choice and residential mobility responses to local income taxes exploiting a special tax regime which applies to foreign employees residing in Switzerland. The institutional setting used generates a deterministic duration threshold at 5 years of stay in the country, at which the local tax rates an individual faces simultaneously change in all municipalities. We exploit this exogenous variation by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to merged survey and administrative individual-level data. A dynamic location choice model allows us to derive testable hypotheses of individuals' location choices and mobility decisions. Our estimated treatment effects provide causal evidence for tax-induced residential choices and tax induced intra-national mobility

Applications of FM-CW laser radar to antenna contour mapping

The FM-CW coherent laser radar concept, based on the FM radar principle which makes use of the coherence and lunability of injection laser diodes, is discussed. Laser radar precision/time tradeoffs, block diagrams, system performance, fiber optic system implantation, and receiver improvements are briefly described

Are asylum seekers more likely to work with more inclusive labor market access regulations?

In the face of recent refugee migration, early integration of asylum seekers into the labor market has been proposed as an important mechanism for easing their economic and social lot in the short as well as in the long term. However, little is known about the policies that foster or hamper their participation in the labor market, in particular during the important initial period of their stay in the host country. In order to evaluate whether inclusive labor market policies increase the labor market participation of asylum seekers, we exploit the variation in asylum policies in Swiss cantons to which asylum seekers are randomly allocated. During our study period from 2011 to 2014, the employment rate among asylum seekers varied between 0% and 30.2% across cantons. Our results indicate that labor market access regulations are responsible for a substantial proportion of these dierences, in which an inclusive regime increases participation by 11 percentage points. The marginal eects are larger for asylum seekers who speak a language that is linguistically close to the one in their host canton

Measuring the In-Process Figure, Final Prescription, and System Alignment of Large Optics and Segmented Mirrors Using Lidar Metrology

The fabrication of large optics is traditionally a slow process, and fabrication capability is often limited by measurement capability. W hile techniques exist to measure mirror figure with nanometer precis ion, measurements of large-mirror prescription are typically limited to submillimeter accuracy. Using a lidar instrument enables one to measure the optical surface rough figure and prescription in virtuall y all phases of fabrication without moving the mirror from its polis hing setup. This technology improves the uncertainty of mirror presc ription measurement to the micron-regime