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We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant–native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

When vacancies are filled, the ads that were posted are often not withdrawn, creating "phantom" vacancies. The existence of phantoms implies that older job listings are less likely to represent true vacancies than are younger ones. We assume that job seekers direct their search based on the listing age and so equalize the expected benefit of a job application across listing age. Forming a match with a vacancy of age α creates a phantom of age α with probability β and this leads to a negative informational externality that affects all vacancies of age α and older. Thus, the magnitude of this externality decreases with the age of the listing when the match is formed. Relative to the constrained efficient search behavior, the directed search of job seekers leads them to over-apply to younger listings. We illustrate the model using US labor market data. The contribution of phantoms to overall frictions is large, but, conditional on the existence of phantoms, the social planner cannot improve much on the directed search allocation.

Following state-level legal changes that increase labor dismissal costs, firms increase their innovation in new processes that facilitate the adoption of cost-saving production methods, especially in industries with a large share of labor costs in total costs. Firms with high innovation ability exhibit larger increases in process innovation and capital-labor ratios - an effect driven by both increases in capital investment and decreases in employment. By facilitating the adjustment of the input mix when conditions in input markets change, innovation ability allows firms to mitigate value losses and is a key driver of their performance.

We propose a new model of the macroeconomy which is simple and tractable, yet explicit about the foundations of liquidity. Monetary policy is implemented via swaps of money for liquid bonds in a secondary asset market. Prices are flexible, yet policy has real effects because money, bonds, and capital are imperfect substitutes, both in the short run and in the long run. The model unifies two classical channels through which the price of liquidity affects the economy (Friedman's real balance effect vs Mundell's and Tobin's asset substitution effect), and it shines light on important macroeconomic questions: the causal link between interest rates and inflation, the effects of money demand shocks, and the existence and persistence of a liquidity trap where interest rates are zero but inflation is positive.

En este trabajo se presenta nueva evidencia acerca del efecto que la politica monetaria tiene sobre la inversion y la financiacion de las empresas en Estados Unidos y en el Reino Unido. Las empresas mas jovenes y que no pagan dividendos son las que muestran la mayor, —y estadisticamente significativa—, reaccion en terminos de inversion en capital fijo, mientras que las empresas relativamente antiguas casi no presentan reaccion alguna. Esto es asi aun controlando por caracteristicas tradicionales en esta literatura, como son el tamano, el crecimiento en activos, la valuacion, el apalancamiento y liquidez. La reaccion de empresas jovenes que no pagan dividendos explica el movimiento de la inversion agregada. Despues de una contraccion en la politica monetaria, se observa una reaccion de la valuacion de todas las empresas, mientras que la deuda responde solo para aquellas empresas jovenes que no pagan dividendos. Esto se debe a que estas ultimas son las mas expuestas a cambios en el valor del colateral a la hora de endeudarse. Por otro lado, se observa tambien una reaccion en los flujos de caja, aunque dicha reaccion es relativamente pequena y homogenea entre empresas. Estos resultados resaltan la importancia de la estructura financiera, asi como de las fricciones en la financiacion externa de las empresas, en la amplificacion de los efectos de la politica monetaria sobre la inversion empresarial.

In this paper we investigate whether long run time series of income per capita are better described by a trend-stationary model with few structural changes or by unit root processes in which permanent stochastic shocks are responsible for the observed growth discontinuities. For a group of advanced and developing countries in the Maddison database, we employ a unit root test that allows for an unspecified number of breaks under the alternative hypothesis (up to some ex ante determined maximum). Monte Carlo simulations studying the finite sample properties of the test are reported and discussed. When compared with previous findings in the literature, our results show less evidence against the unit root hypothesis. We find even fewer rejections when relaxing the assumption of Gaussian shocks. Our results are broadly consistent with the implications of evolutionary macro models which posit frequent growth shifts and fat-tailed distribution of aggregate shocks.

Recently, many developing countries have implemented several bioeconomy plans to transform their rural economies and improve food security at local, national, and regional levels. Yet, there are limited success stories and examples of a competitive bioeconomy in Africa while levels of poor and food in-secured population remain high. Drawing on the novel concepts of biomass value-web, national innovation system and Porter's Diamond model, this paper analyses the emerging biomass opportunities and institutional challenges limiting sustainable bioeconomy growth in Africa. Using the Nigerian maize sector as a case study, qualitative data obtained from 54 stakeholders through 14 interviews, six focus group discussions, and six Net-maps served as a foundation for our network and content analyses. Results revealed numerous opportunities to further upgrade the current maize biomass value-web. However, the challenge of low farm productivity, inadequate infrastructure, low biomass demand and utilization by industrial firms at the mid-stream, deficient innovation and support system and inconsistent government plan pivoted on several institutional challenges such as weak and uncoordinated institutional arrangement and unfavorable institutional environment to limit competitive bioeconomy growth in the sector. The study concludes that important institutions in various innovation subsystems would need to actively perform harmonizing activities within a favorable institutional environment before competitive bioeconomy growth can be attained in Africa.

Introduction Previous studies on occupational health focussed predominately on the occurrence of occupational diseases. Relatively few studies have measured how employment is associated with the use of healthcare services. This study investigates the association between employment and the extent and range of healthcare use, such as medical expenditures, of women in South Korea. Methods We analyze data of the Korean Health Panel, an ongoing longitudinal national representative survey, from 2008 to 2017, to identify the status of economic activity of women by year and age group. We estimate the association between female employment status and medical expenditures by using random effect panel Tobit models. Furthermore, we investigate the association between employment status and the range of healthcare services in biomedicine and traditional Korean medicine (KM) by conducting conditional fixed-effects logistic regression analyses. Results For women aged between 25 and 65 in 2017, the majority of them were employed or self-employed. (The proportion of employment of self-employment equals 64.80%). In addition, working women spent 11.6% less on healthcare than nonworking women, and self-employment lowered the healthcare expenditure by 13.1%. Neither work nor the type of work is related to the types and range of healthcare service use. Being employed or self-employed is negatively associated with women’s expenditure on healthcare. Conclusions The findings show that employment is associated with less spending on healthcare. They imply that employment has a positive impact on women’s health.

Self-selection–based division of labor has gained visibility through its role in varied organizational contexts such as nonhierarchical firms, agile teams, and project-based organizations. Yet, we know relatively little about the precise conditions under which it can outperform the traditional allocation of work to workers by managers. We develop a computational agent-based model that conceives of division of labor as a matching process between workers’ skills and tasks. This allows us to examine in detail when and why different approaches to division of labor may enjoy a relative advantage. We find a specific confluence of conditions under which self-selection has an advantage over traditional staffing practices arising from matching: when employees are very skilled but at only a narrow range of tasks, the task structure is decomposable, and employee availability is unforeseeable. Absent these conditions, self-selection must rely on the benefits of enhanced motivation or better matching based on worker’s private information about skills, to dominate more traditional allocation processes. These boundary conditions are noteworthy both for those who study as well as for those who wish to implement forms of organizing based on self-selection.

This article investigates the employment effect of short-time work in the Netherlands during the Great Recession (2009–2011). Short-time work was introduced during the period as a special arrangement with the aim of reducing unemployment hikes by offering firms the possibility of adjusting the working time of specialised workers rather than adjust the size of their workforce. The authors focus on the effect of short-time work at the individual level of the worker and study whether short-time programme participants in surviving firms had a lower job turnover rate and transition rate to unemployment compared to workers who did not participate in the programme. Furthermore, the authors study whether the flexibility policies of the firm had a substantial influence on the effectiveness of short-time work in protecting workers from unemployment. Specifically, they investigate whether the effect of short-time work is related to the intensiveness of its use by the firm and the extensiveness of the use of external flexibility arrangements – i.e. temporary contracts and temporary agency workers – by the firm. For this purpose, the authors apply a discrete-time survival model using a unique dataset with monthly register data from Statistics Netherlands. Participants in the short-time work programme are compared with non-participant workers from firms that used short-time work and workers from firms that did not make use of the programme. The findings indicate that, in surviving firms, short-time work had a positive effect: the risk of unemployment and job separation is, in most cases, lower for short-time work participants than non-participants. Short-time work is most effective in protecting workers from unemployment in firms that extended the use of the programme to many workers and for a relatively small number of hours, and that made either moderate use of temporary agency workers or extensive use of fixed-term contracts.

We examined why overqualified employees may report heightened levels of experienced incivility, particularly when they have successfully negotiated task i-deals from their employers. Adopting a person-job fit perspective, we examined our proposed model in two studies with employees in the higher education industry (Study 1) and workers from a range of industries and occupations (Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 229), the moderated mediation model showed that task i-deals attenuated the positive relationship between perceived overqualification and boredom sensations, which was associated with reduced experienced incivility. In Study 2 (N = 222), using a time-lagged design, we expanded on Study 1 findings by examining dimensions of person-job fit, namely, demands-abilities fit and needs-supplies fit, as well as perceptions of being envied by coworkers as mechanisms. Supporting our theorizing, we showed that task i-deals buffered the negative relationship between perceived overqualification and demands-abilities fit. Ironically, the provision of i-deals intensified overqualified employees' perceptions of being envied by coworkers, which in turn explained their reported experiences of incivility. These results highlighted the complexity of reducing interpersonal stressors, wherein the provision of task i-deals minimized the misfit and associated boredom sensations of overqualified employees. Yet, such customized working arrangements intensified overqualified employees' feelings of being envied and their reports of experienced incivility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

We estimate fiscal multipliers for Austria in a framework of model uncertainty emanating from the choice of a particular econometric model. We present a comprehensive framework that allows to assess the effects of different multiplier definitions and choices related to the data, the model employed, and further technical choices associated with the specification of the model exert on fiscal multiplier estimates. The mean present-value government spending multiplier over all models entertained, based on around 3,000 estimates, is 0.68. Estimates of the peak spending multiplier for Austria tend to be larger than present-value spending multipliers, with a mean value of 0.85. The magnitude of the present-value tax multiplier is relatively high, with an average value across specifications of −1.12 and the mean peak tax multiplier is −0.54 for all specifications used.

The time-to-success of reward crowdfunding campaigns constitutes a relevant topic that has been neglected in business literature. In this study, we employ parametric and semi-parametric models of survival analysis to identify the determining factors of the duration of success of these campaigns. Based on more than 4,200 reward crowdfunding campaigns, our results are robust for controls and reveal that the campaigns that attain success most rapidly are located predominantly in cities with greater income inequality. These are cities that are characterized by lower fundraising targets and receive a larger number of pledges. In addition, our covariates indicate a non-constant influence on time-to-success during the fundraising period., Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT)

International audience; We present a visual analytics tool, MiningVis, to explore the long-term historical evolution and dynamics of the Bitcoin mining ecosystem. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that attracts much attention but remains difficult to understand. Particularly important to the success, stability, and security of Bitcoin is a component of the system called "mining.'' Miners are responsible for validating transactions and are incentivized to participate by the promise of a monetary reward. Mining pools have emerged as collectives of miners that ensure a more stable and predictable income. MiningVis aims to help analysts understand the evolution and dynamics of the Bitcoin mining ecosystem, including mining market statistics, multi-measure mining pool rankings, and pool hopping behavior. Each of these features can be compared to external data concerning pool characteristics and Bitcoin news. In order to assess the value of MiningVis, we conducted online interviews and insight-based user studies with Bitcoin miners. We describe research questions tackled and insights made by our participants and illustrate practical implications for visual analytics systems for Bitcoin mining.

We analyze in this paper the long term effect of a high school remedial education program, almost two decades after its implementation. We combine high school records with National Social Security administrative data to examine longer-term outcomes when students were in their early 30s. Our evidence suggest that treated students experienced a 10 percentage points increase in completed years of college schooling, an increase in annual earnings of 4 percentage points, an increase of 1.5 percentage points in months employed, and a significant increase in intergenerational income mobility. These gains are reflecting mainly improvement in outcomes of students from below median income families. Therefore, we conclude that remedial education program that targeted underachieving students in their last year of high school had gains that went much beyond the short term significant improvements in high school matriculation exams. A cost benefit analysis of the program suggests that the government will recover its cost within 7-8 years, implying a very high rate of return to this remedial education program.\ud \ud

International audience; Ammonia has a potential as carbon-free and high-energy density compound for chemical storage of renewable energies and its synthesis from green H2 requires to be as energetically efficient as possible. In this work, a superstructure optimization methodology for process synthesis is proposed and applied to an ammonia production process. The approach covers three different scales: process, equipment, and molecules. Process scale refers to finding the optimal process structure, while the equipment scale is related to the best set of operating conditions, and the molecular scale studies two catalysts (Fe and Ru) with their respective kinetic rates. The optimization intends to minimize the Levelized Cost of Ammonia (LCOA) and maximize the energy efficiency. The best trade-off is found with the Ru catalyst, with an LCOA of 766 €/tNH3 and 57.2 % of energy efficiency. In comparison with reference cases, the LCOA decreases 0.6 % and the energy efficiency increases 1.5%. The main improvement is found in the pressure, 75 bar, reduced in 25 %. The production of 11.6 tNH3/day equals to 2.5 MW of stored power from 3 MW supplied as H2 to the process, with a total energy consumption of 10.67 kW h/kgNH3, including prior H2 and N2 production processes.

During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable. Theoretical Considerations: the Impact of Austerity Packages Data and Estimation Strategy Main Results Extension: A Case Study Conclusion Data availability statement Footnotes References

I study how supplier contracting frictions shape the patterns of intermediate input use and quantify the impact of these distortions on aggregate productivity. Using the frequency of litigation between US firms as a novel measure to capture the need for formal enforcement, I find a robust relationship between countries' input-output structure and their quality of legal institutions. In countries with high enforcement costs, firms have lower expenditure shares on intermediate inputs in sector pairs where US firms litigate frequently for breach of contract. A quantitative model shows that improvement of contract enforcement institutions would lead to sizable welfare gains.

Provided is a concept of how the carbon content of CO/CO2-containing blast furnace gas (BFG) from steel production could be utilized in a sequence of selective chemical conversion steps to produce high value intermediates for the polymer industry.

Mitigation of global warming, energy security and industrial competitiveness urge the energy-intensive pulp and paper industry (PPI) to transform energy use practices. This study investigates how the PPI has responded to the need for the energy transition in the 2000s. Finland and Sweden as forerunners of energy-efficient operation and decarbonization of the PPI are used as target countries. Understanding of changes in energy consumption is complemented using decomposition analysis (Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index Method) and the energy efficiency index approach. Analysis of companies’ investments in energy technologies is used for explaining changes in energy production. Evidence of significant development towards the more sustainable operation of the PPI was found. Energy consumption per produced unit has decreased, i.e., energy efficiency has improved. Fossil fuels have been partially replaced with bio-based alternatives. Thus, the CO2 intensity has decreased substantially. The generation of renewable electricity has increased in both countries. Examples of Finland and Sweden indicate that the PPI has great potential to contribute to CO2 emission reduction worldwide in the future as energy efficiency can be further improved, and the share of fossil fuels can be decreased increasing the use of biofuels and self-generated green electricity at least in kraft pulp mills.

Family reunification is one of the main channels for migration to the EU, yet little is known about the skills and labour market trajectories of family migrants. Family migration continues to be seen within a gendered and binary paradigm of the male economic migrant and female dependent. Related policies disadvantage migrant women and limit their participation on the labour market in material and structural ways. While EU’s Single Permit Directive gives family migrants immediate and unlimited access to the labour market, its efficacy is limited as highly skilled migrant women are a blind spot in existing infrastructure and integration policies. This paper studies how migrant women push back against being categorised as dependents and circumvent the penalty of family migration policies. Migration categories become key sites of negotiation as women opt to move as students, labour migrants, by acquiring citizenship or as temporary workers to gain better access to the labour market while accomodating familial roles. Findings highlight the need for disaggregated data on family migrants in terms of skill and education, and for data collection that can capture the dynamism of lived experience.

We study the effects of a universal child benefit on fertility, identifying separately the effects driven by conceptions and abortions. We focus on a generous lump-sum maternity allowance that was introduced in Spain in 2007 and cancelled in 2010. Using administrative, population-level data, we create a panel data set of the 50 Spanish provinces, with monthly data on birth and abortion rates between 2000 and 2017. Our identification is based on the timing of the introduction and cancellation of the policy (both its announcement and implementation), from which we infer when the effects on abortions and births can be expected. We find that the introduction of the policy led to a 3% increase in birth rates, due to both a decrease in abortions and an increase in conceptions. The announcement of the cancellation of the policy led to a transitory increase in birth rates of 4% just before the cancellation was implemented, driven by a short-term drop in abortions. The cancellation then led to a 6% drop in birth rates. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the positive fertility effect of the benefit introduction was driven by high-skilled parents, while the negative impact of the cancellation was larger among low-skilled and out-of-labor-force parents, and in lower income, higher unemployment regions. We also find suggestive evidence that the child benefit had both a timing effect (“tempo†), so that some women had children earlier, and a level effect (“quantum†), where some women had more children than they would have had otherwise.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3202916; We show that banker bonuses cannot be understood exclusively as incentive contracts, but also incorporate a significant risk sharing dimension between bank shareholders and bank employees. This contrasts with the conventional view whereby diversified shareholders fully insure risk averse employees. However, financial frictions imply that shareholder value is concave in a bank's cash reserves---making shareholders effectively risk averse. The optimal contract between shareholders and employees then involves some degree of risk sharing. Using extensive payroll data on 1.26 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sectors, we show that the structure of bonus pay within and across banks is compatible with an economically significant risk sharing motive, but difficult to rationalize based on incentive theories of bonus pay only.

There is empirical evidence that households use residential houses as status goods. Their visibility qualifies them as an excellent signaling device of the relative income and wealth position, in contrast to less visible financial assets. To this end we introduce a residential housing sector and status concerns for housing into a neoclassical framework. In the model, households derive utility from the absolute amount of housing and from comparing their stock of housing to a reference stock, which is composed of the current or past level of housing of their peers. We analyze how status concerns affect household behavior and find that they increase housing demand and labor supply. Furthermore, we find that status concerns exert a negative externality and elevate housing to inefficiently high levels. We derive a (state contingent) optimal tax that establishes the first-best allocation along the transition path and at the steady state. Calibrating the model to the US we quantify the optimal tax on residential housing to 1.8%. Introducing the optimal tax entails a considerable welfare gain of 0.29% measured in consumption equivalents.

This article analyses the conditions facing labour within the renewable energy (RE) accumulation strategies of electricity capital. We draw on value-theoretical perspectives developed within Marxist and feminist political economy to understand how labour is being reorganised within the transition to RE. We use value theory to identify key dimensions of RE labour across the exploitation of wage labour and the appropriation of labour-in-nature. We apply this lens to data from existing academic and policy studies on ‘employment’ and ‘environmental’ issues in RE value chains. We connect evidence on formal labour market issues such as employment numbers, job quality, and labour organising and state regulation, with research on the socio-ecological conditions of possibility for RE across materials, land and households. We argue that value theory reveals how distributive and sustainability outcomes of RE are a product of how labour is organised in the energy transition. We finish with considerations for union and social movement strategy regarding the scale and scope of green labour agendas within and beyond energy.

This paper investigates the long-term implications of climate change on global migration and inequality. Accounting for the effects of changing temperatures, sea levels, and the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, we model the impact of climate change on productivity and utility in a dynamic general equilibrium framework. By endogenizing people’s migration decisions across millions of $5 \times 5$ km spatial cells, our approach sheds light on the magnitude and dyadic, education-specific structure of human migration induced by global warming. We find that climate change strongly intensifies global inequality and poverty, reinforces urbanization, and boosts migration from low- to high-latitude areas. Median projections suggest that climate change will induce a voluntary and a forced permanent relocation of 62 million working-age individuals over the course of the 21st century. Overall, under current international migration laws and policies, only a small fraction of people suffering from the negative effects of climate change manages to move beyond their homelands. We conclude that it is unlikely that climate shocks will induce massive international flows of migrants, except under combined extremely pessimistic climate scenarios and highly permissive migration policies. In contrast, poverty resulting from climate change is a real threat to all of us.

This study extends our knowledge about the management of older employees in the sector of financial services, which faces enormous transformational pressures (e.g., emergence of artificial intelligence, digital services). Based on the black box model of human resource management, we investigate how executives at 16 major financial institutions manage their total rewards to motivate their older professionals to stay at work longer. Top management’s views towards older professionals underlie a firm’s culture or climate, and more precisely, the extent of the perception that they are a strategic resource that needs focused management. Across firms, such adaptation (or lack thereof) is made through the following total rewards components: (1) flexibility in working time and place of work, (2) hiring of retirees, (3) hiring or promotion of older professionals, (4) role adjustment, (5) responsibilities and performance standards, (6) monetary rewards, benefits, and (7) recognition, succession planning, and support for retirement planning or preparation. The black box model should be used in future research to understand which reward components work best in which contextsto motivate older workers to stay at work longer.

Public constructs of the welfare state are vital for the continuous assurance of the system’s validity, sustainability and accountability. This study produces descriptive cross-country snapshots of how the welfare state is construed in contemporary Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish mass media discourse as an object to relate to. The analysis shows that in Denmark a core question concerned the welfare state’s reliability and accountability to citizens, who have the right to the services that they have paid for through taxes. The problems and solutions were often portrayed as pertaining to economical prioritizations. In Finland, the ability to maintain stability and provide opportunities was framed in a historical light and as supra-generational to its character. In Norway, the legacy of the welfare state was built around notions of solidarity and a sense of community. The declining public incomes from the extraction of oil was a reality for the welfare state to navigate in. In Sweden, more than in the other countries, emphasis was put on the welfare state as a project of values such as solidarity and equality. The contents in each of the four materials can be seen to reflect their origins in operational milieus in which the welfare state is the premise for all public and democratic institutions, including the mass media.

Smart devices have become ubiquitous in everyday life, and it is commonplace that migrants are among the users of connected tools. With the realization that migrants rely on connectivity for multiple purposes, including to access information and services, many initiatives started working on developing ICT tools to assist migrants to integrate into their new society. Technological tools, however, come with inherent risks, many of which are linked to the processing of personal data of their users. This is especially true for migrants, who are often vulnerable due to their migration status, which is not always secure in the host country. To mitigate these risks, we argue that an expanded data protection impact assessment, analyzing not only the impacts related to data protection, but also to the specific situation of migrants, should be conducted at the outset of any technology development project to influence the development of safe and reliable ICT tools for this target population. A practical example of the application of such an assessment is provided, based on the authors’ experience as legal advisors in the REBUILD project, which is one of the current initiatives in the EU aiming to develop ICT tools for migrant integration.

Men extend their employment beyond pensionable age more often than women, but the factors that contribute to this sex difference are unknown. This study aimed to examine sex differences in extending employment and the contribution of sociodemographic, work- and health-related factors to these differences. Participants of this prospective cohort study were 4,263 public sector employees from Finland who reached their individual pensionable date between 2014 and 2019 and responded to a survey on work- and non-work-related issues before that date. Extended employment was defined as continuing working for over six months beyond the individual pensionable date. We used mediation analysis to examine the contribution of explanatory factors to the association between sex and extended employment. Of the participants, 29% extended employment beyond the pensionable date. Men had a 1.29-fold (95% confidence interval 1.11-1.49) higher probability of extending employment compared with women. Men had a higher prevalence of factors that increase the likelihood of extended employment than women (such as spouse working full-time, no part-time retirement, low job strain, high work time control, and lack of pain) and this mediated the association of sex with extended employment by up to 83%. In conclusion, men were more likely to extend their employment beyond pensionable age than women. This difference was largely explained by men being more likely to have a full-time working spouse, low job strain, high work time control, no pain, and not being on part-time retirement.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10433-021-00663-1.

BACKGROUND Extensive research shows that replacing animal protein with plant-based protein in the diet would strongly alleviate the environmental impact of the food system. However, much less attention has been given to the socio-economic considerations of dietary transitions. This study analyses the socio-economic performance of innovative legume-based food prototypes, developed in the Protein2Food research project, and conventional animal-based products (chicken meat and dairy milk). We implement a social life cycle assessment (sLCA) to quantify and compare their potential socio-economic impacts along the entire life cycle. RESULTS Findings from this analysis show that legume-based prototypes and their respective animal-based counterparts have, overall, a comparable socio-economic performance. Looking at the disaggregated life cycle stages, socio-economic hotspots (points of most negative impacts) were mainly identified at the production stage in legume-based products. Farm-level net margin and profitability are low when compared with their animal equivalents. However, at the processing stage, there are socio-economic gains for plant-based products regarding lower unemployment rates. Finally, at the consumption stage, there are mixed results. Plant-based products show worse protein affordability but better nutritional contents (lower saturated fat and cholesterol) than their animal counterparts. CONCLUSIONS To improve socio-economic performance of legume-based foods, greater emphasis should be placed upon developing improved processing technologies and supply chains. This would broaden the supply of sustainable protein-rich food options and make these products more economically attractive. The research illustrates that policies should be targeted to the different stages of the food value chain to optimize the development of innovative plant-based foods. © 2021 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Background To examine the association of job strain with cognitive ability and the influence of life-course job strain on later life cognitive decline. Methods Data were derived from six waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe. The study sample consists of 13349 participants aged 50 to 98 years at wave 2 and has been followed up for 12-years. Job strain status across working life was assessed using a short demand-control job strain model containing two core dimensions: job demands and job control collected in wave 3. Cognitive abilities concerning episodic memory was assessed by immediate recall and delayed recall tests, executive function was evaluated by verbal fluency test collected in all waves (waves 2–7) except wave 3. Mixed-effects model was used to estimate working life job strain and its cumulative effect on cognitive decline. Results Both passive and high strain jobs were associated with lower levels of cognitive ability (episodic memory and verbal fluency) in comparison with active job. Long exposure to active- or low strain-job was associated with higher cognitive ability whereas long exposure to passive job or moderate duration of high strain job was associated with lower cognitive ability. The rate of memory decline was positively related to moderate duration of passive job and negatively related to long-term exposure to low strain job. Limitations Information on working conditions was based on self-reported recollections. Conclusions Working life variation in job strain status and their duration may explain individual differences in cognitive ability in later life.

National audience; This paper studies an economy where demand spillovers make firms’ production decisions strategic complements. Firms choose their operating leverage trading off higher fixed costs for lower variable costs. Operating leverage governs firms’ exposures to an aggregate labor productivity shock. In equilibrium, firms exhibit excessive operating leverage as they do not internalize that an economy with higher aggregate operating leverage is more likely to fall into a recession following a negative productivity shock. Welfare losses coming from firms’ failure to coordinate production are amplified by suboptimal risk-taking, which magnifies the impact of productivity shocks onto aggregate output.

This paper assesses whether and how the participation to Global Value Chains (GVCs) contributes to trade imbalances. We test empirically the relationship between GVCs participation and a country’s net export for 42 countries in the period 2000–2014, using the World Input - Output Database (WIOD) on international production linkages. We find that trade balance is positively associated with countries’ involvement in GVCs, but the trade balance worsens the higher the offshoring to lower-income countries, while it improves the higher the offshoring to higher-income countries. This asymmetry suggests that when countries offshore to higher-income partners the gains in competitiveness overcome the potentially negative effect of larger imports of intermediate inputs.

This paper re-examines the dependence structure between uncertainty in oil prices and sovereign credit risk of oil exporters. To address this issue, we employ a copula approach that allows us to capture asymmetric and nonlinear dependence structures. Empirical analyses involve daily data of the 5-year sovereign credit default swaps spreads and the crude oil implied volatility from January 2010 to May 2019, covering a sample of ten oil-exporting countries. Except for Brazil and Venezuela, our results provide evidence of significant positive and upper tail dependence in the relationship between oil market uncertainty and oil exporters' sovereign risk. Overall, our findings highlight that high uncertainty in oil prices coincides with large-scale increases in the sovereign credit risk of oil-exporting countries, supporting the hypothesis that investors, exposed to economic losses from risk events in oil exporters, are all the more pessimistic that prevails high uncertainty about future oil prices. Our findings have implications for oil exporter’ policymakers as well as investors.

This study investigates the relationship between Internet access and migration aspirations and intentions in Africa. While empirical evidence on the role of telecommunications in shaping migration flows is increasing, the relationship between aspirations (desire to migrate) and intentions (migration preparation) has been paid little attention. The analysis is based on the nationally representative 2014 and 2015 surveys of Gallup World Poll in 29 African countries. We modelled migration desire and migration preparation through Probit and Heckman Probit models. The results indicate that having Internet access is positively associated with the desire to move abroad and preparations to migrate once controlling for the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents. The association is higher in the case of migration preparation than in the case of migration desire. Slightly diverse effects are documented in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where the effect of Internet access on migration desire is somewhat higher than in the sample as a whole.

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises the R2, and restores countercyclical variation in bond risk premia that is otherwise missed by forward rates. Consistent with the argument that CG captures the effect of real imbalances on the path of rates, our factor has predictive ability for real bond excess returns. The importance of the gap remains robust out-of-sample and in countries other than the United States. Furthermore, its inclusion brings significant economic gains in the context of dynamic conditional asset allocation. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

The cyclical behavior of markups is at the center of macroeconomic debate on the origins of business-cycle fluctuations and policy effectiveness. In theory, markups may fluctuate endogenously with the business cycle due to sluggish price adjustment or to deeper motives affecting the price-elasticity of demand faced by individual producers. In this article we make use of a large firm- and product-level panel of Portuguese manufacturing firms in the 2004-2010 period. The biggest empirical challenge is to separate supply (TFP) from demand shocks. Our dataset allows to do so, by containing information on product-level prices at a yearly frequency. Furthermore, markups are mismeasured when calculated with the labor share. We use the share of intermediate inputs instead. Our main results suggest that markups are pro-cyclical with TFP shocks and generally counter-cyclical with demand shocks. We also show how markups become procyclical if the markup is obtained using the labour share instead of intermediate inputs. Adjustment costs create a wedge between the labour share and the actual markup which explain the observed correlations. JEL codes: C23, E32, L16, L22

Referring to a survey question in the German socio-economic panel, which measures worries about protecting the environment, the article looks at the development of environmental worries in Germany for the timespan 1984–2019. The analyses mainly have descriptive character. We explore several expectations and assumptions discussed in historical accounts of the environmental movement in Germany and in empirical studies on environmental attitudes and their determinants. Results show that the overall development can be divided into a period of rising environmental worries in the 1980s, a considerable decline in the 1990s, and a relative stability since 2000. From 2018 to 2019, however, a sizable upswing can be observed. Environmental worries are associated negatively with the unemployment rate and economic worries over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s, younger people were more worried than older people, but, in the meanwhile, this no longer holds. Education and (less so) income yielded significant differences in the 1980s and 1990s, but also these differences have faded away since 2000. Data confirm that environmental worries are shared more broadly in the population and that previously important group differences are increasingly leveling out.

This paper makes a case for post-graduate international students as an increasingly important category of immigrant entrepreneur in Canada. We draw our findings from an analysis of new provincial immigrant entrepreneur programs and interviews with international student entrepreneurs in a mid-sized city in Atlantic Canada. We argue that three forces have become increasingly relevant in shaping immigrant entrepreneurs' opportunity structures: (1) the internationalization of higher education institutions (HEIs), (2) the corporatization of HEIs, and (3) the regionalization of immigration. We show how public policy shifts in immigration and education have expanded the opportunity structure for international student start-ups. These entrepreneurs are navigating multiple dimensions of risk that stem from being both temporary migrants and business owners.

Cette etude examine la relation entre la diversite du genre au sein des conseils d’administration et la performance financiere des entreprises cotees a la bourse du Qatar. Nous utilisons la regression des moindres carres ordinaires (MCO) comme technique de base ainsi que la methode des moments generalises (GMM) pour attenuer le probleme eventuel d’endogeneite. Notre analyse revele que la diversite du genre au sein du conseil d’administration a un effet negatif sur la performance financiere. Nos resultats sont robustes a l’utilisation d’autres mesures de la diversite du genre au sein des conseils d’administration et sont exempts de tout probleme d’endogeneite, comme le demontrent les resultats des estimations de la regression systeme-GMM. En outre, nous expliquons les raisons possibles de cette relation negative, notamment dans le contexte du Qatar. Une implication importante de nos resultats est qu’ils identifient les facteurs qui empechent les femmes du Qatar de contribuer de maniere significative aux travaux du conseil d’administration ainsi qu’a la performance financiere des entreprises dans sa societe dominee par les hommes.

The International Working Men’s Association was the prototype of all organizations of the Labor movement. It helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single cou...

Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 × 5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966–2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare.

Parmi les événements qui contribuent à la dynamique démographique, les migrations internationales sont les plus difficiles à appréhender. La plupart des pays du monde ne disposent pas d’instruments permettant de produire des statistiques régulières. D’un pays à l’autre, les définitions et les méthodes de mesure peuvent varier. Depuis le début des années 2000, les organisations internationales, comme les Nations Unies ou l’Union européenne, promeuvent des approches plus standardisées qui permettent de réaliser des comparaisons. Quel que soit l’indicateur retenu, la France apparaît en Europe de l’Ouest comme l’un des pays où l’immigration est la plus faible.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the current state of regional media platforms, identify development problems and justify solutions. Methodology. General scientific methods are used in the research, in particular: theoretical generalization – to determine the main provisions of health care; statistical analysis – to study the dynamics of medical care funding of state structures employees; methods of positive and normative analysis – to develop recommendations for improving the provision of medical services and the state of health care. Results. It was studied that in 2019, among 14,934.9 households, only 8.7% considered their income level sufficient. And 40.2% of households could not afford basic necessities other than food. More than 50% of households said that if incomes increased, they would spend more on treatment. The largest share of households that noted the need for additional treatment costs has an average per capita equivalent cash income per month at the level of 1,920.1–2,640.0 UAH. At the same time, out of the total number of 14,644.5 thousand households, 98.4% noted the need for health services during the year. Statistics show that in 2019, compared to 2018, the number of households that were unable to receive medical care, medicines and medical supplies for family members during the year increased. This trend is observed for both urban and rural residents. As a result, the ecological situation and the human living environment are deteriorating. Threats are created not only for the current population, but also for the lives of future generations. And according to the self-assessment of the health status of the Ukrainian population in 2019, only half of the population (50.4%) marked their condition as good, the rest reported satisfactory (39.5%) and poor (10.1%). Practical meaning. It is revealed that the state of the environment is under threat due to certain prohibitions and restrictions on the control of economic activity in order to ensure favourable conditions for business development which creates an uncontrolled situation of use of natural resources (water, air, land) included in domestic turnover. Prospects for further research. According to the Law of Ukraine “On Basic Principles of State Supervision (Control) in the Field of Economic Activity” it is necessary to warn in advance and clearly define the list of issues and indicators of the economic activity inspection. This distorts the real picture of possible damage to the environment from improper economic activities and unbalanced use of natural resources.

Picking up on the manifestation of state intervention following the 2008 financial crisis, we argue that the recent trend towards remunicipalisation underlines but also problematises the thesis of new state capitalism. Remunicipalisation refers to a process whereby towns, cities and sub-national regions take previously privatised services and infrastructures back into public ownership. Remunicipalisation has led to the emergence of regionally- and municipally-owned state enterprises across a wide range of sectors including water, energy, waste, transport, education, (tele)communications, and health and social care. Engaging with the nature of the ‘new’ state capitalism, and particularly challenging its theoretically restrictive understanding of the state as ‘market enabler’, we highlight that remunicipalisations have often emerged in response to the failed promise of neoliberal capitalism to improve the quality and efficiency of public services through the (supposed) competitiveness of the free market. Like neoliberalism, remunicipalisations take spatially diverse and variegated forms as market-driven logics interact with other political and economic determinations. As such, remunicipalisations often encompass critiques of neoliberal governance and market volatility, and instead focus on the potential of regional wealth creation as well as stabilising local market dynamics through diversifying ownership forms. Drawing upon our ongoing empirical work on German remunicipalisation, we aim to foreground how multiple determinations at work in the German political economy at different spatial scales shape its particular trajectory out of neoliberal mutation. We show how the remunicipalisation of energy provider TEAG has enabled the local state to intervene and diversify the uneven economic geographies in the state of Thuringia.

Workers who experience language barriers are more likely to get injured or sick because of their work and have poorer claim and return-to-work outcomes compared to other workers. To better understand the systemic factors that shape access to compensation in contexts of language barriers, we compared language accommodation policies and practices in the Quebec and Ontario workers’ compensation systems. We uncovered gaps limiting access to professional interpreters in both provinces, although gaps were more pronounced in Quebec where workers were responsible for the cost of interpreters. We argue that simply improving the linguistic competence of workers’ compensation systems is not sufficient to tackle access barriers and must be accompanied by efforts to address the root causes of social and economic inequities for workers who experience language barriers.

Amidst growing concern about the displacement of rural populations exposed to climate change, new financial instruments are increasingly being presented as key tools for the management of climate risks. Index-based agricultural insurance (IBAI) is a particularly key example. Recent critical work has pointed to the deeply neoliberal character of IBAI and like interventions. However, the promotion of new financial instruments in response to crises of agrarian production has a much longer history in Africa and elsewhere. This article draws on Marx’s concept of ‘latent’ surplus populations to trace out and explain parallels between IBAI and colonial interventions in Senegal’s groundnut basin. Approaching the question in this way, the article highlights the long-run historical co-production and interdependence of the Senegalese state and a political ecology of groundnut production in which relations of indebtedness and the exposure to variable rainfall of a fragile relative surplus population has often been crucial to the mobilization of cheap labour for groundnut production. IBAI is thus positioned as part of a recurrent trajectory of emergency financial interventions aimed at smoothing out the contradictions implicit in this socio-ecological configuration.