When to Start a Fight and When to Fight Back: Liability Disputes in the Workers' Compensation System

Despite the adoption of no-fault Workers' Compensation legislation in most states, there is substantial litigation over the issue of employer liability for injury claims. We develop a sequential asymmetric information model of liability disputes and estimate the model using data on injury claims from the state of Minnesota. The key insight of our model is that when workers differ in their costs of pursuing a injury claim, employers have an incentive to deny liability and force those with higher costs to abandon their claim. Likewise, workers who expect a bigger return from pursuing their claim are more likely to fight back when liability is denied. Estimates of the structural model confirm that the decision rules of both parties depend on the expected costs and benefits of continuing the dispute. The model provides a parsimonious but relatively successful explanation for the distribution of liability disputes across different workers and types of injuries.

Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) Data Base Maintenance System (DBAM) user's guide and system description

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) Data Base Maintenance System (DBAM) is explained. The various software facilities of the SEL, DBAM operating procedures, and DBAM system information are described. The relationships among DBAM components (baseline diagrams), component descriptions, overlay descriptions, indirect command file listings, file definitions, and sample data collection forms are provided

The Effects of a Reading Comprehension Intervention Package on Increasing Third Grade Students\u27 Comprehension Skills

Increasing students\u27 reading comprehension involves the use of targeted strategies and effective instruction. Previous research has shown that instruction in individual skills such as vocabulary acquisition, reading fluency, writing, and story mapping help increases students\u27 reading comprehension. However, few studies have explored combining these skills and their cumulative effects, if any, on reading comprehension. The purpose of this quasi-experimental secondary analysis study was to examine the effects of adding a reading comprehension instruction package (RCIP), which includes vocabulary acquisition, reading fluency, and writing, to instruction in story mapping alone. Constructivist theory was used as the theoretical framework for this study. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 8 students with low reading achievement as indicated by their performances on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The single-case, multiple-probe design across subjects was used to intermittently collect data, which were the correct responses per 3 minutes using the Curriculum Based Measure-Reading Maze. The data were visually analyzed by looking at data points and trend lines directionality using the percentage nonoverlapping data along with the Cohen\u27s d effect size. Although this study showed mixed results and were not statistically significant, it could still contribute to positive social change. The findings have a small to medium effect size impact on students\u27 reading comprehension; 3 out of 4 students who completed the study surpassed their expected goal. The results from this study may provide teachers with tools for improving the foundational reading skills of struggling readers, thus enabling their students to succeed in school and become productive members of society

Racial and economic factors in attitudes to immigration

In this paper we distinguish between three channels that determine attitudes to further immigration: labour market concerns, welfare concerns, and racial or cultural concerns. Our analysis is based on the British Social Attitudes Survey. A unique feature of the survey is that it includes questions on attitudes towards immigration from different origin countries, with populations differing in ethnic similarity to the resident population. It also contains sets of questions relating directly to the labour market, benefit expenditure and welfare concerns, and racial and cultural prejudice. Based on this unique data source, we specify and estimate a multiple factor model that allows comparison of the relative magnitude of association of attitudes to further immigration with the three channels, as well as comparison in responses across potential immigrant groups of different origin. Our results suggest that, overall, welfare concerns play a more important role in determination of attitudes to further immigration than labour market concerns, with their relative magnitude differing across potential emigration regions and characteristics of the respondent. In addition, we find strong evidence that racial or cultural prejudice is an important component to attitudes towards immigration; however, this is restricted to immigration from countries with ethnically different populations

Self-organized escape of oscillator chains in nonlinear potentials

We present the noise free escape of a chain of linearly interacting units from a metastable state over a cubic on-site potential barrier. The underlying dynamics is conservative and purely deterministic. The mutual interplay between nonlinearity and harmonic interactions causes an initially uniform lattice state to become unstable, leading to an energy redistribution with strong localization. As a result a spontaneously emerging localized mode grows into a critical nucleus. By surpassing this transition state, the nonlinear chain manages a self-organized, deterministic barrier crossing. Most strikingly, these noise-free, collective nonlinear escape events proceed generally by far faster than transitions assisted by thermal noise when the ratio between the average energy supplied per unit in the chain and the potential barrier energy assumes small values

Designing with Ada for satellite simulation: A case study

A FORTRAN-operated and an Ada-oriented design for the same system are compared to learn whether an essentially different design was produced using Ada. The designs were produced by an experiment that involves the parallel development of software for a spacecraft dynamics simulator. Design differences are identified in the use of abstractions, system structure, and simulator operations. Although the designs were significantly different, this result may be influenced by some special characteristics discussed

Designing with Ada for satellite simulation: A case study

A FORTRAN oriented and an Ada oriented design for the same system are compared to learn whether an essentially different design was produced using Ada. The designs were produced by an experiment that involves the parallel development of software for a spacecraft dynamics simulator. Design differences are identified in the use of abstractions, system structure, and simulator operations. Although the designs were vastly different, this result may be influenced by some special characteristics discussed

Progressive postnatal assembly of limbic-autonomic circuits revealed by central transneuronal transport of pseudorabies virus

The development of neuronal projections to a target and the establishment of synaptic connections with that target can be temporally distinct events, which typically are distinguished by functional assessments. We have applied a novel neuroanatomical approach to characterize the development of limbic forebrain synaptic inputs to autonomic neurons in neonatal rats. Transneuronal labeling of preautonomic forebrain neurons was achieved by inoculating the ventral stomach wall with pseudorabies virus (PRV) on postnatal day 1 (P1), P4, or P8. In each age group, PRV-positive neurons were present in autonomic and preautonomic regions of the spinal cord and brainstem 62-64 hr after inoculation. Transneuronal forebrain labeling in rats injected on P8 was similar to the transneuronal labeling reported previously in adult rats and included neurons in the medial and lateral hypothalamus, amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and visceral cortices. However, no cortex labeling and only modest amygdala and bed nucleus labeling were observed in rats injected with PRV on P4, and only medial hypothalamic labeling was observed in rats injected on P1. Additional tracing experiments involving central injections of PRV or cholera toxin β indicated that lateral hypothalamic and telencephalic regions projected to the medullary dorsal vagal complex several days before establishing synaptic connections with gastric-related autonomic neurons. These results demonstrate a novel strategy for evaluating synaptic connectivity in developing neural circuits and show a temporally segregated postnatal emergence of medial hypothalamic, lateral hypothalamic, and telencephalic synaptic inputs to central autonomic neurons

Is Workers' Compensation Covering Uninsured Medical Costs? Evidence fromthe `Monday Effect'

Steady increases in the costs of medical care, coupled with a rise in the fraction of workers who lack medical care insurance, have led to a growing concern that the Workers' Compensation system is paying for off-the-job injuries. Many analysts have interpreted the high rate of Monday injuries -- especially for hard-to-monitor injuries like back sprains -- as evidence of this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a test of the hypothesis that higher Monday injury rates are due to fraudulent claims. Specifically, we compare the daily injury patterns for workers who are more and less likely to have medical insurance coverage, and the corresponding differences in the fraction of injury claims that are disputed by employers. Contrary to expectations, we find that workers without medical coverage are no more likely to report a Monday injury than other workers. Similarly, employers are no more likely to challenge a Monday injury claim -- even for workers who lack medical insurance.