Old Wine in New Bottles: The Effect of Previous Co-Worker Experience on the Survival of New Firms

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of previous co-worker experience on the survival of new established firms. For the empirical analysis I use the Danish Integrated Database of Labor Market Research (IDA). This longitudinal employer-employee database allows me to identify co-worker experience among all members of the firm. In addition, I will make a distinction between ordinary start-ups and entrepreneurial spin-offs. The results show that previous co-worker experience has a positive effect on new firm survival. This effect appears to be valid predominantly for ordinary start-ups then for spin-offs.

Political attention to environmental issues: Analyzing policy punctuations in the Netherlands

One of the most dramatized features in Al Gore's movie The Inconvenient Truth is the effects of a rising sea-level in the Netherlands. The film is an example of how the mobilization of bias in the Netherlands resulted in sudden high levels of attention for climate change problems. We analyze agenda setting on Dutch environmental policy, using various policy issue datasets about parliamentary activities, media, and expert organizations and focusing on the interrelations between these policy venues. All datasets are coded by the same topic codebook. The findings show that interest in environmental issues is largely determined by the state of the economy, unexpected incidents, and the competition for attention with other issues in the political arena. We show that political interest in environmental issues has initially been flagging, since the environment was mostly seen as a European topic, and Europe has not been popular since the referendum on a European Constitution. However, once the climate change problem was translated to a national problem, popular attention increased enormously. We conclude that climate change framed as a European problem does not increase attention, nationalization of the problem does

The Danish Integrated Database for Labor Market Research: Towards Demystification for the English Speaking Audience

An increasing number of studies, in a wide range of disciplines, make use of so-called linked employer-employee databases. These detailed databases are only available in a limited number of countries. Denmark is one of the countries that makes this data available to researchers that are connected to a Danish research institute. Due to the sensitivity of the data, access is only granted after a thorough screening process and under strict conditions. Nevertheless, there is an international interest in the structure of this database and what information it provides. The purpose of this document is to provide such an description in English.

Differences between spring wheat cultivars for emergence and early development after seed infection with Fusarium culmorum

Infection of wheat seeds with Fusarium spp. causes seedling blight. As a result of this disease, fields sown with infected seeds show a reduced plant density. This is especially a problem in organic agriculture, for which currently no practical seed disinfection methods are available. In the present project we investigated whether spring wheat cultivars differ in sensitivity to seedling blight, whether the possible differences could be linked to cultivar differences in early growth rates, and what size the delay in canopy closure resulting from the plant reductions was. Six spring wheat cultivars (Melon, Lavett, SW Kungsjet, Epos, Pasteur, Thasos), containing three infection levels (averages 5, 15 and 27%) of Fusarium culmorum were obtained and were sown in a field experiment in 2006 in 4 repetitions. Measurements included percentage of emergence, light interception and above ground dry matter to calculate relative growth rates. Infection of seeds with F. culmorum resulted in lower plant densities and a delay in time to 10% light interception of up to 5 days. First preliminary results also show that cultivars differ for sensitivity to seedling blight, and that cultivars with higher early growth rates appeared to be less sensitive to seedling blight, with the exception of cultivar Thasos. If future experiments confirm this relation, it could be used to select cultivars which are more resistant to seedling blight

Investigating alterations of social interaction in psychiatric disorders with dual interactive eye tracking and virtual faces

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Equilibrium Computation in Resource Allocation Games

We study the equilibrium computation problem for two classical resource allocation games: atomic splittable congestion games and multimarket Cournot oligopolies. For atomic splittable congestion games with singleton strategies and player-specific affine cost functions, we devise the first polynomial time algorithm computing a pure Nash equilibrium. Our algorithm is combinatorial and computes the exact equilibrium assuming rational input. The idea is to compute an equilibrium for an associated integrally-splittable singleton congestion game in which the players can only split their demands in integral multiples of a common packet size. While integral games have been considered in the literature before, no polynomial time algorithm computing an equilibrium was known. Also for this class, we devise the first polynomial time algorithm and use it as a building block for our main algorithm. We then develop a polynomial time computable transformation mapping a multimarket Cournot competition game with firm-specific affine price functions and quadratic costs to an associated atomic splittable congestion game as described above. The transformation preserves equilibria in either games and, thus, leads -- via our first algorithm -- to a polynomial time algorithm computing Cournot equilibria. Finally, our analysis for integrally-splittable games implies new bounds on the difference between real and integral Cournot equilibria. The bounds can be seen as a generalization of the recent bounds for single market oligopolies obtained by Todd [2016].Comment: This version contains some typo corrections onl

Spin critical opalescence in zero temperature Bose-Einstein Condensates

Cold atom developments suggest the prospect of measuring scaling properties and long-range fluctuations of continuous phase transitions at zero-temperature. We discuss the conditions for characterizing the phase separation of Bose-Einstein condensates of boson atoms in two distinct hyperfine spin states. The mean-field description breaks down as the system approaches the transition from the miscible side. An effective spin description clarifies the ferromagnetic nature of the transition. We show that a difference in the scattering lengths for the bosons in the same spin state leads to an effective internal magnetic field. The conditions at which the internal magnetic field vanishes (i.e., equal values of the like-boson scattering lengths) is a special point. We show that the long range density fluctuations are suppressed near that point while the effective spin exhibits the long-range fluctuations that characterize critical points. The zero-temperature system exhibits critical opalescence with respect to long wavelength waves of impurity atoms that interact with the bosons in a spin-dependent manner.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure