Working time flexibility components and working time regimes in Europe: using company-level data across 21 countries

Working time ?exibility comprises a wide variety of arrangements, from part-time, overtime, to long-term leaves. Theoretical approaches to grouping these arrangements have been developed, but empirical underpinnings are rare. This article investigates the bundles that can be found for various ?exible working time arrangements, using the Establishment Survey on Working Time and Work–Life Balance, 2004/2005, covering 21 EU member states and 13 industries. The results from the factor analyses con?rmed that working time arrangements can be grouped into two bundles, one for the employee-centred arrangements and second for the employer-centred arrangements, and that these two bundles are separate dimensions.Wealso tested the stability of the factor analysisoutcome, showing that although we ?nd some deviations from the pan-Europe and pan-industry outcome, the naming of the components as ?exibility for employees and ?exibility for employers can be considered rather stable. Lastly, we ?nd three country clusters for the 21 European countries using the bundle approach. The ?rst group includes the Northern European countries along side Poland and Czech Republic, the second group the continental European countries with UK and Ireland, and lastly, the southern European countries with Hungary and Slovenia

Sustainable university entrepreneurship: Revisiting firm growth patterns

[Abstract]: Previous research on the firm growth of the university spin-offs (USOs) and its drivers yields inconclusive results. Recently, the literature on the high-growth firms (HGFs) has relied on regression quantile methods to study how the effects of growth determinants may differ along the firm growth distribution. This study builds a bridge between the two strands of literature by exploring how firm-specific characteristics may shape sales and employment growth patterns of USOs. To this end, it applies panel data quantile regression models in a sample of 531 Spanish USOs over the period of 2001–2013. The results show that the growth drivers not only differ between employment growth and sales growth but also along the growth distributions

Alternative job search strategies in remote rural and peri-urban labour markets: the role of social networks

This paper examines the importance of informal methods (especially social networking) to the job search strategies used by unemployed people. It compares three areas: a small rural town; a larger, more sparsely populated, remote rural area; and a centrally-located, peri-urban labour market. The analysis is based first on survey research undertaken with 490 job seekers across the study areas. Emerging issues were then followed up during a series of twelve focus groups. The survey research showed that job seekers in the rural study areas were significantly more likely to use social networks to look for work. However, those who had experienced repeated or long-term periods out of work, the unskilled and young people were significantly less likely to use such networks. Focus groups confirmed the perceived importance of social networking to the job search process in rural areas, in contrast to the more marginal role such methods appear to play in peri-urban settings. For many rural job seekers, formal job search activities conducted through Jobcentres were seen as largely symbolic, lacking the practical value of social networking. These results suggest that service providers seeking to assist unemployed people in rural areas need to address the problems faced by many disadvantaged job seekers who are currently caught between their lack of social network relations and the absence of local public employment service facilities in more remote communities

GPUs, a new tool of acceleration in CFD: efficiency and reliability on smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a numerical method commonly used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate complex free-surface flows. Simulations with this mesh-free particle method far exceed the capacity of a single processor. In this paper, as part of a dual-functioning code for either central processing units (CPUs) or Graphics Processor Units (GPUs), a parallelisation using GPUs is presented. The GPU parallelisation technique uses the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) of nVidia devices. Simulations with more than one million particles on a single GPU card exhibit speedups of up to two orders of magnitude over using a single-core CPU. It is demonstrated that the code achieves different speedups with different CUDA-enabled GPUs. The numerical behaviour of the SPH code is validated with a standard benchmark test case of dam break flow impacting on an obstacle where good agreement with the experimental results is observed. Both the achieved speed-ups and the quantitative agreement with experiments suggest that CUDA-based GPU programming can be used in SPH methods with efficiency and reliability

Quantitative characterisation of contourite deposits using medical CT

Five sediment cores, retrieved from four different depositional contouritic morphological settings (a sheeted drift, a confined mounded drift, a mounded elongated drift and a plastered drift) from the Northern Gulf of Cadiz and the Alboran Sea have been analysed using medical X-ray computed tomography (medical CT). A quantitative approach has been used, resulting in a workflow that delineates several radio-density ranges based on the Hounsfield Unit (HU) histogram of each core and tracks these ranges throughout the cores. In order to derive the geological significance, the radio-density ranges of all cores have been compared to non-destructive, continuous chemical and physical proxies as well as grain size measurements. The highest correlations occurred between high HU and proxies indicating elevated bottom currents, such as Zr/Al and sortable silt. Additionally, a continuous increase in average HU and inferred bottom current velocities, needed for the creation of the specific contourite setting, could be observed throughout the five cores. Despite imperfections and the requirement of additional research, promising results have been obtained which could improve the detection of diagnostic criteria for contourites. Moreover, the CT data can give more conclusive evidence on the nature of the (contourite) sedimentary sequence boundaries

Chromosomal, epigenetic and microRNA-mediated inactivation of LRP1B, a modulator of the extracellular environment of thyroid cancer cells

The low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein (LRP1B), encoding an endocytic LDL-family receptor, is among the 10 most significantly deleted genes across 3312 human cancer specimens. However, currently the apparently crucial role of this lipoprotein receptor in carcinogenesis is not clear. Here we show that LRP1B inactivation (by chromosomal, epigenetic and microRNA (miR)-mediated mechanisms) results in changes to the tumor environment that confer cancer cells an increased growth and invasive capacity. LRP1B displays frequent DNA copy number loss and CpG island methylation, resulting in mRNA underexpression. By using CpG island reporters methylated in vitro, we found that DNA methylation disrupts a functional binding site for the histone-acetyltransferase p300 located at intron 1. We identified and validated an miR targeting LRP1B (miR-548a-5p), which is overexpressed in cancer cell lines as a result of 8q22 DNA gains. Restoration of LRP1B impaired in vitro and in vivo tumor growth, inhibited cell invasion and led to a reduction of matrix metalloproteinase 2 in the extracellular medium. We emphasized the role of an endocytic receptor acting as a tumor suppressor by modulating the extracellular environment composition in a way that constrains the invasive behavior of the cancer cells

Measuring Flexicurity: Precautionary Notes, a New Framework, and an Empirical Example

Recently, there has been an increase and abundance of literature measuring flexicurity across countries. However, there is yet to be any agreement on the definition of the key concepts of flexicurity as well as the framework in which to base one’s research. Due to this, the outcomes found in the existing studies are rather diverse, far from reaching a consensus, and can be misleading. This paper addresses the issues by first introducing a framework, namely, the various levels and stages of flexicurity, as well as introducing some key issues that should be addressed when doing flexicurity indicators research. In addition, an empirical example is given to show how the framework derived can be used to carry out flexicurity research, and to show how by not regarding these frameworks one can come to misleading outcomes