The effects of vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany

Vocational training programmes have been the most important active labour market policy instrument in Germany in the last years. However, the still unsatisfying situation of the labour market has raised doubt on the efficiency of these programmes. In this paper, we analyse the effects of the participation in vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany. Based on administrative data for the time between the October 1999 and December 2002 of the Federal Employment Administration, we apply a bivariate mixed proportional hazards model. By doing so, we are able to use the information of the timing of treatment as well as observable and unobservable influences to identify the treatment effects. The results show that a participation in vocational training prolongates the unemployment duration in Eastern Germany. Furthermore, the results suggest that locking-in effects are a serious problem of vocational training programmes. JEL Classification: J64, J24, I28, J6

Ramanujan sums as supercharacters

The theory of supercharacters, recently developed by Diaconis-Isaacs and Andre, can be used to derive the fundamental algebraic properties of Ramanujan sums. This machinery frequently yields one-line proofs of difficult identities and provides many novel formulas. In addition to exhibiting a new application of supercharacter theory, this article also serves as a blueprint for future work since some of the abstract results we develop are applicable in much greater generality.Comment: 32 pages. Comments welcom

“Focus on the Users”: Empathy, Anticipation, and Perspective-taking in Healthcare Architecture

This dissertation is a phenomenological anthropology of intersubjectivity in the design of healthcare architecture. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with architectural designers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation details how architectural designers derive and enact their understandings of the healthcare professionals and patients for whom they design. Since the 1960s, many architects have taken up an orientation toward design that I herein refer to as “Methodological User-Centricity” (MUC). The premise is simple: better design hinges on better empirical knowledge of the people being designed for, and that knowledge is best acquired by what are often social-science-inspired methods. One of the most influential encapsulations of this orientation in design today (in architecture and beyond) is “empathy”. The healthcare architects in this ethnographic study believed “empathic” knowledge of “users”—including patients, doctors, nurses—was essential to improving healthcare, and sought to develop this understanding of occupants through games, interviews, and other methods for learning about users’ needs, values, and experiences. Situated in this context, this dissertation examines the background premises and methods through which these architectural designers enact their specific forms of constituting others and intervening in the built environment on their behalf. Working from data running the gamut of architectural activities from initial stages of user research and conceptualization, to completion and retrospective evaluation by both designers and end-users, the dissertation analyzes the diverse modalities of experience by which members of architectural project teams orient themselves to users’ needs and possibilities. In doing so, the dissertation approaches architecture as a polymorphous response to others, one ultimately rooted in manifold forms intersubjectivity and degrees of social understanding. Nevertheless, this dissertation also presents a critical analysis of unintentional shortcomings arising through unequal user representation in architectural designers’ research with healthcare institutions

The effects of short-term training measures on the individual unemployment duration in West Germany

Short-term training measures are the most important intervention of German active labor market policy in terms of persons promoted. However, evidence on the impacts of programs is missing. This study analyzes the effects of these programs on the individual unemployment duration in West Germany. By applying a multivariate mixed proportional hazards model, we are able to consider information of the timing of treatment in the unemployment spell as well as observable and unobservable factors to control for selectivity. Moreover, we allow treatment effects to vary over time and take account of heterogeneity in the effects due to individual differences. --Training Measures,Active Labor Market Policy,West Germany,Multivariate Mixed Proportional Hazards,Time-Varying Treatment Effects

Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Firm Leverage

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic un-certainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non{financial US firms drawn from the COM-PUSTAT quarterly database covering the period 1991{2001. The estimates confirm that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, firms decrease their levels of leverage. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our results are robust with respect to the inclusion of the index of leading indicators.Leverage; Uncertainty; Non-financial firms; Panel data

An automated workflow for parallel processing of large multiview SPIM recordings

Multiview light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) allows to image developing organisms in 3D at unprecedented temporal resolution over long periods of time. The resulting massive amounts of raw image data requires extensive processing interactively via dedicated graphical user interface (GUI) applications. The consecutive processing steps can be easily automated and the individual time points can be processed independently, which lends itself to trivial parallelization on a high performance cluster (HPC). Here we introduce an automated workflow for processing large multiview, multi-channel, multi-illumination time-lapse LSFM data on a single workstation or in parallel on a HPC. The pipeline relies on snakemake to resolve dependencies among consecutive processing steps and can be easily adapted to any cluster environment for processing LSFM data in a fraction of the time required to collect it.Comment: 13 pages with supplement, LATEX; 1 table, 1 figure, 2 supplementary figures, 2 supplementary lists, 2 supplementary tables; corrected error in results table, results unchange