The Relationship Between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health. This paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive U.S. censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates. I use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education. The results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality, and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature.     

Wage and Mobility Effects of Trade and Migration on the Austrian Labour Market

This study analyses the effect of trade and migration on wages and labour marketmobility. We estimate wage growth equations and a multinomial logit mobilityequation on an individual data set ranging from 1991 to 1994. We find substantialdifferences in the reactions of white and blue-collar workers wages and mobilityto trade and migration. In Austria exports have a positive and imports a negativeimpact on wage growth only for blue-collar workers. Migrants also reduce onlyblue-collar workers wage growth. Our results indicate that higher imports and aninflow of migrants reduce sectoral mobility of all types workers. The risk of beingout of work by contrast is increased by migration and imports only for blue-collarworkers, but reduced by exports for all types of workers. In general our results suggestenlargement of the EU would have only small effects on the Austrian labour market.     

Improving the effectiveness of nondisclosure agreements by strengthening concept learning

Intellectual property infringements rank among the top economic crimes, even though there are mechanisms in place to prevent their occurrence. One such mechanism are nondisclosure agreements, which, however, have been reported to fail in practice. This article argues that this may be overcome by strengthening employees’ concept learning. In an experiment, we investigated whether extended nondisclosure agreements, which provide the employee with detailed explanations and examples, lead to better recognition of trade secrets as compared to a standard nondisclosure agreement or no agreement at all. It was found that the extended nondisclosure agreement indeed increased participants’ ability to judge what falls under the trade secret law, whereas the standard nondisclosure agreement showed no such effect. Furthermore, the effects of the factors ‘Involvement’, ‘Specificity’, ‘Publicity’, and ‘Purpose’ on the identification of trade secrets could be proven experimentally. Employees’ judgments of whether an information represents a trade secret seem to rely on general cognitive processes. From this follows that concept learning could be integrated into systematic approaches for protecting intellectual property.     

Moral Pragmatism as a Bridge Between Duty,Utility, and Virtue in Managers’ Ethical Decision-Making

Journal of Business Ethics - The decline of empirical research on ethical decision-making based on ethical theories might imply a tacit consensus has been reached. However, the exclusion of virtue...     

Supply chain risk analysis: a shipbuilding industry case

A lack of empirical studies on Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) is observed, especially in the industries of large projects. Therefore, this paper conducts a risk analysis on the Brazilian Shipbuilding Industry by generating an initial risk profile. A panel was conducted with executives from major shipyards, and the primary risks were identified, assessed, and evaluated. Findings corroborate the academic literature, reinforcing that companies recognise the importance of SCRM, but the concept is incipient and far from being successfully implemented in real life. Despite the fact that the shipyards identified important risks, the focus was on internal factors. Because the industry was exposed to risks from the external environment, no risk mitigation actions existed, resulting in the bankruptcy of many shipbuilders. This research is an initial step toward investigating SCRM techniques, offering academics a novel empirical approach that can serve as a systematic risk management tool for supply chain planning.     

Between Neoliberal Governance and the Right to the City: Participatory politics in Berlin and Tel Aviv

Based on a comparison of Berlin and Tel Aviv, this article investigates the ways in which ensembles of participatory instruments mediate between neoliberal urban regimes and political agency shaping differentially the meaning of participation and the types of claims that can be advanced. The article gives an overview of the recent history of both cities through the lens of participatory politics. Two in‐depth case studies further examine the relationship between participatory politics and claim making in each setting: the recent conflict over a social center in the district of Friedrichshain‐Kreuzberg in Berlin and the Levinsky tent city of 2011 in Tel Aviv. In the concluding section, the article suggests that, rather than assuming that participatory tools either co‐opt movements or can be appropriated by them, we need to rethink the relationship between participatory tools, rights and recognition, and ask how participatory structures and political agency constitute each other in interwoven dynamics.     

Fisher Ideal Indexes in the National Income and Product Accounts

The mastery of the spreadsheet technique has become almost universal in economics departments. The authors explain, step-by-step, how the spreadsheet can be used as an instructional aid to teach basic microeconomic concepts.     

Wage differences between Austrian men and women: <Emphasis Type="Italic">semper idem?</Emphasis>

In most OECD countries, the wage gap between men and women has narrowed during the past two decades. Developments of the last 20 years, e.g., increased labour market attachment of women or the introduction of equal pay laws, may have reduced the gender wage gap. We investigate the extent, persistence, and socio-economic determinants of the gender wage gap in Austria, for the years 1983 and 1997. Using wage decomposition techniques, we find that the average gender wage gap was almost as high in 1997 as it was in 1983. Not accounting for differences, the gender wage gap dropped from 25.5 to 23.3% of men’s wages. Taking observable differences between men and women into account, we estimate that the mean gender wage gap that cannot be explained, i.e., discrimination against women, dropped from 17 to 14% of men’s wages. A decomposition of the gender wage gap over time indicates that both returns to human capital and less discrimination were responsible for the narrowing of the gender wage gap.

Regime-switching factor models in which the number of factors defines the regime

We develop regime-switching factor models in which the number of factors determines the operative economic regime. To illustrate the proposed methodology, we analyze the covariance structure of a widely studied set of 25 equity portfolios.