The Blind Viewer

After watching Peter Gidal’s Room Film 1973, Michael Snow commented: ‘Your film had to be worked at. I felt… as if it was made by a blind man. I felt that searching tentative quality, the quality of trying to see’ (1.). The desire to see anew, as if it was for the first time, a learning to unlearn (2.), is one of the most enduring aspects of Gidal’s film practice and theory. A body of material as rich with possibilities as unresolved questions, paradoxes and dead ends. And yet, at a time when artists’ moving image has too often become a sheer repository for discourse, a reinvestment in Gidal’s attentiveness to the ‘coming into presence’ of the film may shed light on what these images and sounds do, rather than say. The question remains: how is a critique of image-production enacted, instead of represented? Notes: (1.) Snow, Michael, September 1973, quoted by Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural / Materialist Film’, Structural Film Anthology, London: BFI, 1978, p.17 (2.) Borrowing a famous line from the poem, ‘what we see of things is things’ by Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa, Fernando, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Exeter: Shearsman Books, 200

On the industry experience premium and labor mobility

There is evidence that experience premium differs across industries. We propose a theoretical model for explaining these differences. We assume that labor mobility brings external knowledge to the firm, which increases its productivity. We find that industry experience premium is decreasing in the inter-firm mobility costs, while increasing in the learning-by-doing and the technological level of the industry. Moreover, it has a U-shape relationship with the level of learning-by-hiring, the substitutability between different types of experienced workers and the variety of knowledge in the industry. Results are consistent with the empirical findings that R&D-intensive industries have steeper wage profiles.wage growth, labor mobility, learning-by-hiring, industry experience premium

Labor mobility and Inter-industry Wage Variation

This paper offers a new explanation for the empirically observed inter-industry wage variation. We represent an industry by a small open economy with inter-firm labor mobility. Each industry is characterized by a degree of learning-by-doing, learning-by-hiring, inter-firm mobility costs and technological level. In this economy we analyze how these features affect the wage level of the industry. The variety of knowledge within an industry and its capital intensity is also analyzed. Results show that industries with high learning-by-hiring and low mobility costs generally pay higher wages. More learning-by- doing and higher technological level in an industry is also giving higher wages. Results provide new hypotheses to be tested and are consistent with the finding that more capital intensive industries pay higher wages.labor mobility, inter-industry wage differences, learning-by-hiring

The local context and the spatial diffusion of multiparty competition in urban Mexico (1994-2000)

Multiparty competition, Mexican politics

Class voting, spatial segregation and metropolitan context: Operators in pluralized urban countries

class voting