Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical predictions have rarely been tested. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protections by U.S. state courts over the last three decades to evaluate the link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Longitudinal Business Database, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protections reduce employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, analysis of plant-level data provides evidence of capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity following the introduction of wrongful-discharge protections. This last result is potentially quite important, suggesting that mandated employment protections reduce productive efficiency as theory would suggest. However, our analysis also presents some puzzles including, most significantly, evidence of strong employment growth following adoption of dismissal protections. In light of these puzzles, we read our findings as suggestive but tentative.

Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical predictions have rarely been tested. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protections by U.S. state courts over the last three decades to evaluate the link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Longitudinal Business Database, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protections reduce employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, analysis of plant-level data provides evidence of capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity following the introduction of wrongful-discharge protections. This last result is potentially quite important, suggesting that mandated employment protections reduce productive efficiency as theory would suggest. However, our analysis also presents some puzzles including, most significantly, evidence of strong employment growth following adoption of dismissal protections. In light of these puzzles, we read our findings as suggestive but tentative.Dismissal Costs, Employment Fluctuations, Entry and Exit, Labor Productivity, TFP, Entrepreneurship.

AIOps for a Cloud Object Storage Service

With the growing reliance on the ubiquitous availability of IT systems and services, these systems become more global, scaled, and complex to operate. To maintain business viability, IT service providers must put in place reliable and cost efficient operations support. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is a promising technology for alleviating operational complexity of IT systems and services. AIOps platforms utilize big data, machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to enhance IT operations with proactive actionable dynamic insight. In this paper we share our experience applying the AIOps approach to a production cloud object storage service to get actionable insights into system's behavior and health. We describe a real-life production cloud scale service and its operational data, present the AIOps platform we have created, and show how it has helped us resolving operational pain points.Comment: 5 page

Options for upgrading the intensity of the CERN lead pre-injector ion source

CERN's heavy ion pre-injector has been in service since 1994, providing lead ions for fixed target collisions at 177 GeV per nucleon in the SPS. In the LHC era, heavy ion collisions require an increase in the beam brightness, compared to the present injector system of Linac 3, Proton Synchrotron Booster and the Proton Synchrotron. Stacking and cooling ions in a Low Energy Ion Ring should find the largest part of this increase. However, further improvements can be envisaged by upgrading the pre-injector and source. The performance and limitations of the present source and Linac 3 will be discussed, and options for increasing the source brightness will be presented. These options consist of upgrades of the ECR Source to higher frequencies, or its replacement with a Laser Ion Source

Geometrically Induced Gauge Structure on Manifolds Embedded in a Higher Dimensional Space

We explain in a context different from that of Maraner the formalism for describing motion of a particle, under the influence of a confining potential, in a neighbourhood of an n-dimensional curved manifold M^n embedded in a p-dimensional Euclidean space R^p with p >= n+2. The effective Hamiltonian on M^n has a (generally non-Abelian) gauge structure determined by geometry of M^n. Such a gauge term is defined in terms of the vectors normal to M^n, and its connection is called the N-connection. In order to see the global effect of this type of connections, the case of M^1 embedded in R^3 is examined, where the relation of an integral of the gauge potential of the N-connection (i.e., the torsion) along a path in M^1 to the Berry's phase is given through Gauss mapping of the vector tangent to M^1. Through the same mapping in the case of M^1 embedded in R^p, where the normal and the tangent quantities are exchanged, the relation of the N-connection to the induced gauge potential on the (p-1)-dimensional sphere S^{p-1} (p >= 3) found by Ohnuki and Kitakado is concretely established. Further, this latter which has the monopole-like structure is also proved to be gauge-equivalent to the spin-connection of S^{p-1}. Finally, by extending formally the fundamental equations for M^n to infinite dimensional case, the present formalism is applied to the field theory that admits a soliton solution. The resultant expression is in some respects different from that of Gervais and Jevicki.Comment: 52 pages, PHYZZX. To be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Parameter identification in a semilinear hyperbolic system

We consider the identification of a nonlinear friction law in a one-dimensional damped wave equation from additional boundary measurements. Well-posedness of the governing semilinear hyperbolic system is established via semigroup theory and contraction arguments. We then investigte the inverse problem of recovering the unknown nonlinear damping law from additional boundary measurements of the pressure drop along the pipe. This coefficient inverse problem is shown to be ill-posed and a variational regularization method is considered for its stable solution. We prove existence of minimizers for the Tikhonov functional and discuss the convergence of the regularized solutions under an approximate source condition. The meaning of this condition and some arguments for its validity are discussed in detail and numerical results are presented for illustration of the theoretical findings

Lattice sites of ion-implanted Li in diamond

Published in: Appl. Phys. Lett. 66 (1995) 2733-2735 citations recorded in [Science Citation Index] Abstract: Radioactive Li ions were implanted into natural IIa diamonds at temperatures between 100 K and 900 K. Emission channelling patterns of a-particles emitted in the nuclear decay of 8Li (t1/2 = 838 ms) were measured and, from a comparison with calculated emission channelling and blocking effects from Monte Carlo simulations, the lattice sites taken up by the Li ions were quantitatively determined. A fraction of 40(5)% of the implanted Li ions were found to be located on tetrahedral interstitial lattice sites, and 17(5)% on substitutional sites. The fractions of implanted Li on the two lattice sites showed no change with temperature, indicating that Li diffusion does not take place within the time window of our measurements.

Skyrme Crystal In A Two-Dimensional Electron Gas

The ground state of a two-dimensional electron gas at Landau level filling factors near $\nu =1$ is a Skyrme crystal with long range order in the positions and orientations of the topologically and electrically charged elementary excitations of the $\nu=1$ ferromagnetic ground state. The lowest energy Skyrme crystal is a square lattice with opposing postures for topological excitations on opposite sublattices. The filling factor dependence of the electron spin-polarization, calculated for the square lattice Skyrme crystal, is in excellent agreement with recent experiments.Comment: 3 pages, latex, 3 figures available upon request from [email protected]

TIME-RELATED QUALITY DIMENSIONS OF URBAN REMOTELY SENSED BIG DATA

Abstract. Our rapidly changing world requires new sources of image based information. The quickly changing urban areas, the maintenance and management of smart cities cannot only rely on traditional techniques based on remotely sensed data, but also new and progressive techniques must be involved. Among these technologies the volunteer based solutions are getting higher importance, like crowd-sourced image evaluations, mapping by satellite based positioning techniques or even observations done by unskilled people. Location based intelligence has become an everyday practice of our life. It is quite enough to mention the weather forecast and traffic monitoring applications, where everybody can act as an observer and acquired data – despite their heterogeneity in quality – provide great value. Such value intuitively increases when data are of better quality. In the age of visualization, real-time imaging, big data and crowd-sourced spatial data have revolutionary transformed our general applications. Most important factors of location based decisions are the time-related quality parameters of the used data. In this paper several time-related data quality dimensions and terms are defined. The paper analyses the time sensitive data characteristics of image-based crowd-sourced big data, presents quality challenges and perspectives of the users. The data quality analyses focus not only on the dimensions, but are also extended to quality related elements, metrics. The paper discusses the connection of data acquisition and processing techniques, considering even the big data aspects. The paper contains not only theoretical sections, strong practice-oriented examples on detecting quality problems are also covered. Some illustrative examples are the OpenStreetMap (OSM), where the development of urbanization and the increasing process of involving volunteers can be studied. This framework is continuing the previous activities of the Remote Sensing Data Quality Working Group (ICWGIII/IVb) of the ISPRS in the topic focusing on the temporal variety of our urban environment.</p