Economic and Statistical Analysis of Discrimination in Hiring

Legal and administrative determinations of employers\u27 compliance with equal employment opportunity (EEO) requirements often hinge on the Issue of the availability of protected class members to employers. That is, courts and affirmative action review agencies compare the hire rates of protected class members (the ratio of the number of protected class members hired to the number who applied or who were potentially available) to the comparable ratio for other applicants, in assessing whether an employer\u27s hiring policies meet the standards required of them by equal opportunity regulations. The purpose of this paper is to review what economic theory suggests affects availability and to analyze the extent to which these factors are considered in administrative or judicial decisions concerning hiring policies. In our analyses, we point out areas where there seem to be inconsistencies or unresolved issues

Comparable-Worth Wage Adjustments and Female Employment in the State and Local Sector

Our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable-worth wage-adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector. The simulation is based on estimates of within-occupation male/female substitution and across-occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 Census of Population

Comparable Worth in the Public Sector

Proponents of comparable worth assert that within a firm jobs can be valued in terms of the skill, effort and responsibility they require, as well as the working conditions they offer, and that jobs that are of comparable worth to the firm should receive equal compensation. After documenting the major push that has occurred for comparable worth in the state and local sector, Section II of our paper discusses the case for and against comparable worth from the perspective of analystical economists.The reminder of the paper is empirical in nature and focuses on issues that arise when one attempts to implement comparable worth. Section III addresses attempts by various states to infer if comparable worth "wage gaps" exist from job evaluation studies they have conducted and tests how sensitive their results are to the statistical methods used to infer discrimination. Section IV estimates whether male/female comparable worth wage gaps nay partially be compensating differentials for differences in opportunity for occupational nobility. Finally Section V presents estimates of systems of demand curves for state and local government employees and tests whether within occupational groups male/female substitution occurs as male/female wage rates change and whether substitution occurs across occupations as occupational wages change. These estimates are then used to simulate what the likely effect of a comparable worth wage policy would be on employment of females in the state and local sector.

Estimating Wage-Fringe Trade-Offs: Some Data Problems

Our paper attempts to identify the types of data nee3ed to estimate tradeoffs between wages and fringe benefits (such as pensions); it also explores the usefulness for this estimation of one particular employer- based data set collected by gay Associates. We stress three things: first, that employer-based data sets are required. Second, because pensions and many other fringe benefits are actuarial functions of wages or salaries, these technical relationships must be accounted for in estimation. Third, to take account of unobservable heterogeneity of employees across employers, one must use econometric methods that control for these unobservable variables. The paper concludes with a discussion of our attempts to estimate the tradeoff between wages and fringe benefits using a unique database for 200 establishments that contains information on wages and actuarial valuations of employer costs of fringe benefits at three different job levels.

Decision making with decision event graphs

We introduce a new modelling representation, the Decision Event Graph (DEG), for asymmetric multistage decision problems. The DEG explicitly encodes conditional independences and has additional significant advantages over other representations of asymmetric decision problems. The colouring of edges makes it possible to identify conditional independences on decision trees, and these coloured trees serve as a basis for the construction of the DEG. We provide an efficient backward-induction algorithm for finding optimal decision rules on DEGs, and work through an example showing the efficacy of these graphs. Simplifications of the topology of a DEG admit analogues to the sufficiency principle and barren node deletion steps used with influence diagrams

Regional Economic Development Initiative - REDI : for the benefit of the towns of Auburn, Bedford, Candia, Derry, Goffstown, Hooksett, Londonderry, and Manchester

The objective of the Regional Economic Development Initiative serving the communities of Auburn, Bedford, Candia, Derry, Goffstown, Hooksett, Londonderry, and Manchester is to insure employment opportunities are available for the estimated 7,000 jobs that become available in these communities annually due to restructuring, downsizing, consolidation, bankruptcies and relocation of existing business. An additional component is to organize a training center and revolving loan fund to assist micro and small business owners for start up and expansion of their businesses. This office will serve as a hub for information such as demographics for each of the eight towns and the state of N H . Availability of work force, commercial real estate accommodations, capital and credit sources availability and the appetite of the individual communities for new or expanding business will be accessible at this office or on their web site. The vision is a one stop shopping center for the region in encouraging new business to locate in the area and existing businesses to expand to provide jobs for the 7,000 people displaced annually. Inquiring businesses coming to the center will be welcomed by the staff and would be invited to review the computerized information available regarding available sites, workforce, real estate tax structure, community attitude relative to their business, competition, transportation, tax incentives, if available, financing opportunities, maps and visual aids. After the visit, interested businesses would be connected with economic development officers in the designated community of their interest. (Author abstract)Smith, G. R. (1997). Regional Economic Development Initiative - REDI. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.eduMaster of Science (M.S.)School of Community Economic Developmen

Using a Primordial Gravitational Wave Background to Illuminate New Physics

A primordial spectrum of gravitational waves serves as a backlight to the relativistic degrees of freedom of the cosmological fluid. Any change in the particle physics content, due to a change of phase or freeze-out of a species, will leave a characteristic imprint on an otherwise featureless primordial spectrum of gravitational waves and indicate its early-Universe provenance. We show that a gravitational wave detector such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna would be sensitive to physics near 100 TeV in the presence of a sufficiently strong primordial spectrum. Such a detection could complement searches at newly proposed 100 km circumference accelerators such as the Future Circular Collider at CERN and the Super Proton-Proton Collider in China, thereby providing insight into a host of beyond Standard Model issues, including the hierarchy problem, dark matter, and baryogenesis.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; added reference

The classical capacity of quantum thermal noise channels to within 1.45 bits

We find a tight upper bound for the classical capacity of quantum thermal noise channels that is within $1/\ln 2$ bits of Holevo's lower bound. This lower bound is achievable using unentangled, classical signal states, namely displaced coherent states. Thus, we find that while quantum tricks might offer benefits, when it comes to classical communication they can only help a bit.Comment: Two pages plus a bi