办公环境与心理健康

本文从办公室的空气环境、视觉环境、声音环境、电磁辐射、空间布局等几方面出发,分别阐述了这些物理因素对员工心理健康的影响,并提出为员工提供一个舒适的工作空间,有利于员工提高工作满意度与工作效率,以及有助于员工的心理健康。     

Pump Up the Volume: Making Health and Wellbeing the Centre Stage of Economic Growth

The aim of this article is to comment on ‘Healthier Australians’, Chapter 2 in the Productivity Commission's report Shifting the Dial. The report elevates health and wellbeing to a central role in lifting the nation's productivity. The main recommendations centre around better information in the health care system and improving the architecture of the system to ensure more decentralised decision making. If acted upon, these solid building blocks could provide significant opportunities to save lives and improve the health of the population and the wealth of the country.     

Wealth Effects,Local Area Attributes,and Economic Prospects: On the Relationship between House Prices and Mental Wellbeing

This research exploits large variations in local house prices to investigate whether house prices correlate with mental wellbeing, and uses contrasting implications for the effect of house prices on the mental wellbeing of homeowners and renters to shed light on why this correlation might arise. I document a positive correlation between house prices and the mental wellbeing of both homeowners and non‐homeowners, which is inconsistent with a pure wealth effect. Instead this finding suggests that local house prices provide a reflection of available amenities and economic opportunities in the area.     

Unemployment and indeterminacy

Using an efficiency-wage model, we examine the relationship between indeterminacy and unemployment insurance. It is shown that the less unemployment insurance is, the more likely equilibrium is to be indeterminate. Equilibrium can be indeterminate even without externalities or increasing returns, which makes a sharp contrast to the recent literature on indeterminacy. Our result is based on the fact that the no-shirking condition with marginal utility of wealth kept constant is downward sloping when income insurance is not perfect.     

独生子女政策的精神健康成本

本文运用广义倍差法系统探讨了独生子女政策对精神健康的影响。独生子女政策使得独生子女在家庭受到过分宠爱,但当他们离开家庭走向独立时,却面临激烈的社会竞争。这一转变提升了他们的压力水平,恶化了他们的精神健康状况。基于全国残疾人抽样调查和中国家庭跟踪调查数据的实证分析结果表明,独生子女政策推行后,步入社会的青年组相对于少年组的精神残疾率的上升幅度在显著扩大,且这一变化对于男性和独生子女尤为明显。另外,相对于女性,独生子女政策推行之后出生的男性比这之前出生的男性的精神状况(情绪郁闷或精神紧张)的恶化程度更明显,且这一模式对于独生子女更显著。本文揭示了独生子女政策的精神健康成本,有助于更全面地反思独生子女政策。     

Immigration and Unemployment*

The wisdom of maintaining high levels of immigration into Australia has been questioned, particularly on the grounds that migration contributes to aggregate unemployment. This paper uses both statistical causality techniques and conventional structural models to investigate the relationship between immigration and unemployment in the post-war period in Australia. The tests find no evidence of any association from migration to unemployment, though there is strong evidence of a significant effect of Australian unemployment on migration. The results indicate that immigration policy should not be dictated by unfounded fears of immigration causing unemployment, at least over the range of previous Australian experience.     

Land and Urban Unemployment

This paper re–examines the effects of expansion of land itself on unemployment and welfare in the mobile–capital Harris–Todaro model with land in agriculture. We show the possibility of immiserization and the harmful effects on employment contrary to the conventional results.     

Unemployment Benefits and Entrepreneurship

Several recent empirical papers show that unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurs. In the present paper provide theoretical support in favour of this interesting result. Over fairly general preference patterns we obtain a measure of the opportunity cost of entrepreneurs in the presence of unemployment benefits and derive conditions under which potential entrepreneurs suffer as unemployment benefits rise. We formulate a clear transmission mechanism in the labour market that links unemployment benefits to occupational choice for a group of risk‐averse individuals.     

大学生心理健康教育的实践与探索

自马加爵事件后,全国高校开展了大量的心理健康研究,这些研究的主要关注点在于:当大学生心理出了问题后如何加强外在的干预、救治,而忽视增强其内在的心理抗压能力以确保稳定的心理健康.文章旨在通过团体辅导实验,探索出一种让大学生自觉调适心理来应对、抵抗外在刺激、压力,保持其心理健康和积极向上的精神境界的创新辅导模式.     

工人离职、失业波动与失业保险文献评述

失业不仅涉及失业波动的影响,还包括在职工人的离队。为减少工人搜寻过程中产生的负外部性,应降低工人的信息成本。失业保险政策的实施又降低了失业工人再就业的激励性,应确立有效的失业保险水平,实现产出与社会福利的最大化。     

Unemployment and Workers' Control

The relationship between democratic workers' control and unemployment is explored. When unemployment arises from labor market distortions, market imperfections, or from information imperfections, labor-managed firms are superior to capitalist firms. The firm's governance and decision making structures then play an instrumental role in the level of unemployment. However, when involuntary unemployment arises from effective demand failures, then workers' control may not be able to maintain or to restore full employment. In such cases, collective and coordinated efforts are needed to reduce the level of involuntary unemployment.     

Public Consumption and Unemployment

This paper introduces public consumption—hence the size of the public sector—into an efficiency wage model of the labour market. The effect of a simultaneous rise in taxes and public consumption on unemployment is derived. There arises an unambiguous positive relationship between the size of the public sector and equilibrium unemployment if public and private consumption are substitutes and wages are taxed. The impact of taxes on consumption on unemployment, although in general not equal to zero, is ambiguous.     

Unemployment and consumption patterns

In this paper we obtain empirical evidence about the effect of female and male unemployment on household demand of a selection of goods and services. We analyse the percentage of the family income expenditure on a particular group of goods concerning education, domestic services, leisure goods, hotels etc. The impact of several determinants on each group of commodities is estimated using a Tobit specification. The data used for estimation have been taken from The Household Expenditure Survey (1990–91). Our main result is that male and female unemployment has a different impact on the household consumption.     

Unemployment and immiserizing transfer

This paper reexamines the welfare effects of international transfers in a two country model in the presence of unemployment which is generated by an exogenously specified real minimum wage rate. In this context we have found the necessary conditions for the occurrence of paradoxical as well as normal results on employment as well as welfare.I am grateful to an anonymous referee for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Needless to say, the usual caveat applies.     

Unemployment Invariance

Abstract. This paper provides a critique of the ‘unemployment invariance hypothesis’, according to which the behavior of the labor market, by itself, ensures that the long‐run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity and the labor force. In the context of an endogenous growth model, we show that the labor market alone need not contain all the equilibrating mechanisms to ensure unemployment invariance; in particular, other markets may perform part of the equilibrating process as well. By implication, policies that raise the growth path of capital or increase the effective working‐age population may influence the long‐run unemployment rate.     

Unemployment and econometric learning

We apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen and Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks.     

Improving Human Wellbeing and Ecosystem Health on BC’s Coast: The Challenge Posed by Historic Resource Extraction

Synopsis Haida Gwaii and the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) comprise the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rainforest. British Columbia has encouraged industrial logging of this region. As a result, ecological values have been eroded and natural capital has been drawn down. The logging industry has provided few local economic benefits. Colonization and industrial resource extraction have contributed to high levels of social distress in First Nations communities. Since 2001, logging companies, environmental organizations, and the provincial and First Nations governments have collaborated in developing an Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) approach. EBM is intended to maintain ecosystem integrity and improve human wellbeing. In 2006, the province began implementing EBM by setting aside one third of the GBR’s land base from logging and by proposing transitional EBM requirements. This paper draws on stumpage and forest cover data to analyze natural capital depletion. The analysis indicates that much of the GBR’s natural capital, as represented by timber, has been depleted. Industrial logging was already on the decline before the decision was taken to implement an EBM approach. Expectations for improved socio-economic outcomes under EBM may not be realistic given the constraints implied by past logging. If EBM performance is measured using conventional economic indicators without accounting for past depletion, it risks being found to have failed the goal of improving human wellbeing. This would create pressure to relax EBM provisions to allow more logging, an outcome that would fail both ecosystems and human communities in the long term. If much reduced extraction levels are to support local human wellbeing, a greater share of economic benefits must be retained locally.      

Gender,Work Burden,and Mental Health in Post-Reform China

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how total work burden, including paid work and unpaid care work, affects the mental health of prime-age, employed women and men in urban China. Based on the 2010 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), regression results indicate that total work burden is negatively related to the mental health of both men and women, consistent with the idea that additional work hours reduce time available for rest and leisure. Women have longer working hours and are more likely to be time poor than men, and this gender inequality in total work burden contributes to the gender gap in mental health. The relationships between the components of total work burden – paid and unpaid work – and mental health shed further light on the strength of gender norms and the barriers to redistribution of unpaid work from women to men necessary to reduce the gender gap in mental health.