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We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different times. Using detailed administrative data covering the majority of faculty in Canada, and an event-study research design that exploits within-province variation in exposure to the policy across institutions and academic departments, we find robust evidence that the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 20–40 percent. (JEL I23, J16, J31, J44, K31)

Effective administration of unemployment insurance (UI) is central to its ability to smooth consumption and act as an automatic stabilizer. The federal government's method of allocating funds to administer UI gives the states no incentive to provide quality service at reasonable cost. We first document the deteriorating performance of the UI system in recent recessions and present estimates of a descriptive model relating state workloads to performance. We then characterize UI administration as a standard principal-agent problem, which leads to a method of allocating funds that would motivate states to adopt new technologies and improve performance.

Hydrological modelling of small mountainous catchments is particularly challenging because of the high spatio-temporal resolution required for the meteorological forcings. In-situ measurements of precipitation are typically scarce in these remote areas, particularly at high elevations. Precipitation reanalyses propose different alternative forcings for the simulation of streamflow using hydrological models. In this paper, we evaluate the performances of two hydrological models representing some of the key processes for small mountainous catchments, using different meteorological products with a fine spatial and temporal resolution. The evaluation is performed on 55 small catchments of the Northern French Alps. While the simulated streamflows are adequately reproduced for most of the configurations, these evaluations emphasize the added value of radar measurements, in particular for the reproduction of flood events. However, these better performances are only obtained because the hydrological models correct the underestimations of accumulated amounts (e.g. annual) from the radar data in high-elevation areas.

International audience; PURPOSE: Infectious encephalitis (IE) is a severe disease which requires intensive care unit (ICU) admission in up to 50% of cases. We aimed to describe characteristics, management and outcomes of IE patients who required ICU admission. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ancillary study focusing on patients with ICU admission within the ENCEIF cohort, a French prospective observational multicentre study. The primary criteria for outcome was the functional status at hospital discharge, categorized using the Glasgow outcome scale (GOS). Logistic regression model was used to identify risk factors for poor outcome, defined as a GOS ≤ 3. RESULTS: We enrolled 198 ICU patients with IE. HSV was the primary cause (n = 72, 36% of all IE, 53% of IE with microbiological documentation). Fifty-two patients (26%) had poor outcome at hospital discharge, including 22 deaths (11%). Immunodeficiency, supratentorial focal signs on admission, lower cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) white cells count (2 days were independent predictors of poor outcome. CONCLUSION: HSV is the primary cause of IE requiring ICU admission. IE patients admitted in ICU have a poor prognosis with 11% of in-hospital mortality and 15% of severe disabilities in survivors at discharge.

We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington state. Displaced workers’ earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly wage rates dropped at the time of displacement and recovered sluggishly. Lost employer-specific premiums explain only 17 percent of these losses. Fully 70 percent of displaced workers moved to employers paying the same or higher wage premiums than the displacing employers, but these workers nevertheless suffered substantial wage rate losses. Loss of valuable specific worker-employer matches explains more than one-half of the wage losses. (JEL E32, J22, J31, J63, R23)

Alternative work arrangements, defined both by working conditions and by workers’ relationship to their employers, are heterogeneous and common in the U.S. This article reviews the literature on workers’ preferences over these arrangements, inputs to firms’ decision to offer them, and the impact of regulation. It also highlights several descriptive facts. Work arrangements have been relatively stable over the past 20 years, work conditions vary substantially with education, and jobs with schedule or location flexibility are less family-friendly on average. This last fact helps explain why women are not more likely to have schedule or location flexibility and seem to largely reduce hours to get more family-friendly arrangements. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Ce rapport concerne l'action 1 "État des lieux et recueil de l’information disponible concernant l’aléa torrentiel" du projet HYDRODEMO sur l'évaluation de l’aléa torrentiel dans les petits bassins versants des Alpes du Nord. Nous présentons les différents jeux de données sélectionnés et analysés dans les autres actions du projet: Données météorologiques (principalement des réanalyses), données hydrologiques (séries observées et sélection des bassins versants pour l'action 4) et les données de transport solide (essentiellement issus des curages de plages de dépôts).

Using comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997–2010, this paper finds that small business lending is an unimportant determinant of small business and overall economic activity. A shift-share style research design is implemented to predict county-level lending shocks using variation in preexisting bank market shares and bank supply shifts. Counties with negative predicted lending shocks experienced declines in small business loan originations, indicating that it is costly to switch lenders. However, small business loan originations have an economically insignificant and generally statistically insignificant impact on both small firm and overall employment during the Great Recession and normal times. (JEL E32, E44, E52, G21, G32, L25)

We estimate the marginal value of non-work time (MVT) using a field experiment. We offered job applicants randomized wage-hour bundles. Choices over these bundles yield estimates of the MVT as a function of hours, tracing out a labor supply relationship. The substitution effect is positive. Individual labor supply is highly elastic at low hours and more inelastic at higher hours. For unemployed applicants, our preferred estimate of the average opportunity cost of a full-time job due to lost leisure and household production is 60 percent of after-tax marginal product, and 72 percent when including fixed costs of employment and child-care costs. (JEL C93, J22, J24, J31, J64, J65)

Background New diagnostic tools have been developed to improve the diagnosis of infectious encephalitis. Using a prospective cohort of encephalitis patients, our objective was to identify possible clusters of patients with similar patterns among encephalitis of unknown cause (EUC) and to describe to what extent a patient’s initial presentation may be predictive of encephalitis etiology, particularly herpes simplex virus (HSV) and varicella-zoster virus (VZV). Methods The National Cohort of Infectious Encephalitis in France is an ongoing prospective cohort study implemented in France in 2016. Patients who present with documented or suspected acute infectious encephalitis were included. Focusing on the variables that describe the initial presentation, we performed a factor analysis of mixed data (FAMD) to investigate a pattern of association between the initial presentation of a patient and the etiologic pathogen. Results As of 1 August 2018, data from 349 patients were analyzed. The most frequent pathogens were HSV (25%), VZV (11%), tick-borne encephalitis virus (6%), Listeria (5%), influenza virus (3%), and EUC (34%). Using the FAMD, it was not possible to identify a specific pattern related to the group of EUC. Age, temporal or hemorrhagic lesions, and cerebral spinal fluid lymphocytosis were significantly associated with HSV/VZV encephalitis. Conclusions No initial clinical/imaging/biology pattern was identified at admission among EUC, despite the improvement in diagnostic tools. In this context, the recommendation for a universal, early, probabilistic, initial treatment against HSV and VZV is still relevant, regardless of the initial clinical presentation of the encephalitis.

In mountain areas, the quantification of sediment yield is essential in the diagnosis of a torrential watershed. The objective of this study is to present a prediction method based on multivariate statistical models calibrated from an original data set covering nearly 130 torrential basins in the Northern French Alps. Data on sediment yield and occurrence of torrential events were collected on these catchments thanks to registries from sediment retention basins (average monitoring period of 20 years) and historical archives of the catchment basin managers. On these catchments, several morphological and hydro-meteorological characteristics were calculated (e.g. geological and sediment connectivity indices, the rate of connected eroding areas in the catchment, the Melton index, the slope of the fan, etc.) in order to relate them to sediment production and the frequency of occurrence of torrential events. These models allow the estimation of quantiles of the sediment yield in small torrent catchments. These models could be useful to evaluate sediment yield and the occurrence of torrential events on catchment not equipped with sedimentation structures.

This paper examines the behavior of dual jobholders to test a simple model of wage bargaining versus wage posting in which workers facing hours constraints in their primary job take a second, flexible-hours job for additional income. When a secondary job offers a sufficiently high wage, a worker either bargains with the primary employer for a wage increase or separates. The bargaining model provides a number of predictions that we test using matched employer-employee administrative data from Washington State. The estimates match the model’s predictions quite well. First, separation probabilities in the primary job are sensitive to wages in the secondary job, but hours are not. Second, hours and separations in the secondary job are sensitive to wages in the primary job due to income effects. Third, wage bargaining takes place mainly among workers in the highest wage quartile; for these workers, wage increases in the secondary job lead to wage increases in the primary job. In contrast, for workers in the lowest wage quartile, wage increases in the secondary job lead to higher separation rates but no significant wage increase in the primary job, consistent with wage posting. These patterns suggest that high-wage workers receive a larger share of the surplus generated by the employment relationship.

Background Transcranial sonography is a point-of-care tool recommended in intensive care units (ICU) to monitor brain injured patients. Objectives of the study was to assess feasibility and reliability of the third ventricle (V3) diameter measurement using transcranial sonography (TCS) compared to brain computed-tomography (CT), the gold standard measurement, and to measure the TCS learning curve. Design: prospective study, in a 16-bed neurological ICU in an academic hospital. Every consecutive brain injured adult patient, who required a brain CT and TCS monitoring were included. The V3 diameter was blindly measured by TCS and CT. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland–Altman plot were used to assess the reliability and agreement between TCS and CT V3 measurements. Diagnosis performance of the V3 diameter using TCS to detect hydrocephalus was measured. Absolute difference between V3 measurement by residents and experts was measured consecutively to assess the learning curve. Results Among the 100 patients included in the study, V3 diameter could be assessed in 87 patients (87%) from at least one side of the skull. Both temporal windows were available in 70 patients (70%). The ICC between V3 diameter measured by TCS and CT was 0.90 [95% CI 0.84–0.93] on the right side, and 0.92 [0.88–0.95] on the left side. In Bland–Altman analysis, mean difference, standard deviation, 95% limits of agreement were 0.36, 1.52, − 2.7 to 3.3 mm, respectively, on the right side; 0.25, 1.47, − 2.7 to 3.1 mm, respectively, on the left side. Among the 35 patients with hydrocephalus, V3 diameters could be measured by TCS in 31 patients (89%) from at least one side. Hydrocephalus was, respectively, excluded, confirmed, or inconclusive using TCS in 35 (40%), 25 (29%) and 27 (31%) of the 87 assessable patients. After 5 measurements, every resident reached a satisfactory measurement compared to the expert operator. Conclusion TCS allows rapid, simple and reliable V3 diameter measurement compared with the gold standard in neuro-ICU patients. Aside from sparing irradiating procedures and transfers to the radiology department, it may especially increase close patient monitoring to detect clinically occult hydrocephalus earlier. Further studies are needed to measure the potential clinical benefit of this method. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02830269.

Most hydrological models simulate snowmelt using a degree day or simplified energy balance method, which usually requires a calibration of snow-related parameters using discharge data. Despite its apparent efficiency, this method leads to empirical relations which are not proven to remain valid in a changing climate. The direct application of robust physically-based snow models in hydrological modeling is difficult due to the high number of not easily available input variables this model type requires. The objective of this study is to test the robustness of a physically-based snowpack model that requires only a limited number of common meteorological parameters. The MASiN model computes the energy and mass balance of multiple layers of the snowpack using hourly air temperature, relative humidity and wind speeds, as well as daily precipitations. MASiN was tested at 23 sites across Canada and Sweden, using a unique set of parameters fixed at a single site. At each site, the snow depth simulated by MASiN was compared against measurements. Robustness was challenged by comparing MASiN’s performance to that of three other models on three different criteria. MASiN showed the highest robustness among the tested models. With a unique set of parameters, it showed better results than the three reference models when used in similar conditions and matched their performances when reference models were calibrated at each site. The results prove non-data intensive physically based models to be promising tools for hydrological and other snow cover-related studies.

We examine whether the recent expansions in Medicaid from the Affordable Care Act reduced “employment lock†among childless adults who were previously ineligible for public coverage. We compare employment in states that chose to expand Medicaid versus those that chose not to expand, before and after implementation. We find that although the expansion increased Medicaid coverage by 3.0 percentage points among childless adults, there was no significant impact on employment.

This study suggests several analogue bandwidth mismatch compensation techniques for time-interleaved analogue-to-digital converters. All the techniques adjust the equivalent on-resistance of the track and hold (T/H) under calibration. Simulations of a two-channel time interleaved T/H running at f s = 4 GHz shows the effectiveness of the proposed compensations.

This paper asks whether pay disclosure in the public sector changes wage setting at the top of the public sector distribution. I examine a 2010 California mandate that required municipal salaries to be posted online. Among top managers, disclosure led to approximately 7 percent average compensation declines, and a 75 percent increase in their quit rate, relative to managers in cities that had already disclosed salaries. The wage cuts were largely nominal. Wage cuts were larger in cities with higher initial compensation, but not in cities where compensation was initially out of line with (measured) fundamentals. The response is more consistent with public aversion to high compensation than the effects of increased accountability.

We investigate the time-series properties of firm effects in the AKM models popularized by Abowd et al. (1999). We consider two approaches. The first approach — labelled as the rolling approach — estimates AKM models separately in each T = 2 adjacent time interval. The second approach is based on an extension of the original AKM — labelled as the Time Varying AKM Model (TV-AKM) — in which we allow for unrestricted interactions of year and firm dummies. We correct for biases in the resulting variance decompositions using the leave out correction of Kline et al. (2019). These approaches allow us to examine how firm effects evolve stochastically, their relation to the business cycle, and their contribution to changes in the wage structure at a higher frequency than previously possible. Using data from Washington State, we find that firm effects in earnings and hourly wages are highly persistent. The autocorrelation coefficient between firm effects for wage rates in 2002 and 2014 is 0.74, and between firm effects for earnings in 2002 and 2014 is 0.82. The rolling approach uncovers a significant degree of cyclicality in firm effects. Variability in firm premiums tended to increase during the great recession while the degree of worker and firm assortativity decreased. Time-varying firm effects explains 13% of the variance of log wages and 21% of the variance of log earnings in the Washington state over 2002–2014. Between 2002-2003 and 2013-2014 the variance of firm wage premia decreased by 10%, but this decline was offset by increases in the variance in individual premia and increases in assortative matching that resulted in an overall increase in the variance of wages. Auxiliary evidence suggests that misspecification in AKM models due to the drifting of firm effects is a second-order concern.

Alternative work arrangements, defined both by working conditions and by workers’ relationship to their employers, are heterogeneous and common in the United States. This article reviews the litera...

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more responsive to benefit levels during the recession and its aftermath, with an elasticity between 0.65 and 0.9 as compared to about 0.35 pre-recession.

This paper examines the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. These laws, which give the public access to the salaries of individual faculty members if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different points in time. One of the most persistent and salient features of labour markets around the world is that women earn less than men. A hypothesis recently gaining traction among academic researchers and policy makers is that the gender earnings gap persists in part because it is hidden. There have also been calls in the private sector for more transparency on pay discrepancies between male and female workers. This paper provides new evidence on the causal effect of pay transparency laws on salaries.

The recession of 2008–9 was the deepest and longest downturn in US economic activity since the Great Depression. Like the historic episode of the 1930s, the Great Recession had a particularly large impact on labor markets. Unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009 and only fell back below 6% in 2014 ðfig. 1Þ. The impact on employment rates was even greater: the fraction of the working-age population with a job fell precipitously in 2008 and 2009 ðfig. 2Þ and has as yet only recovered a small fraction of these losses. Most economists believe that the Great Recession was caused by financial market stresses following the collapse of the housing bubble. Nevertheless, some have argued that labor market factors contributed to the persistence of the recession. Average real wages rose in the early stages of the recession and then remained relatively stable ðsee fig. 3Þ, suggesting that realwage rigidities—perhaps reinforced by the availability of extended unemployment insurance benefits—may have been impeding labor market adjustments. The unprecedented rise in long-term unemployment, which by 2011 accounted for nearly one-half of all unemployment spells, has likewise been interpreted by some analysts as evidence that benefit-induced frictions were slowing recovery from the recession. In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research asked the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to sponsor a series of studies on the labor market impacts of the Great Recession. The papers in this issue, all of which have been through the Journal of Labor Economics’ usual refereeing process, are the end result of this process. They offer new perspectives on three fun

Comparing lab and field estimates What do Swiss high-school students and Eastern European seasonal laborers have in common? When the former are tasked with stuffing questionnaires into envelopes in a classroom setting and the latter are employed to pick fruit in the United Kingdom, both work harder in the presence of their peers. Herbst and Mas reanalyzed the results of 35 such studies, either experiments carried out under controlled conditions or empirical studies based on data collected in the field (see the Perspective by Charness and Fehr). Encouragingly, they found that the magnitude of the spillover effect—how much harder a worker works when other workers are alongside—was the same. Science , this issue p. 545 ; see also p. 512

International audience; This paper introduces an analog bandwidth mismatch compensation technique for Time-Interleaved Analog-to-Digital Converters (TI-ADCs). It takes advantage of a Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) technology to compensate for the bandwidth mismatch errors among channels. Our technique utilizes the body-effect to adjust the on-resistance of the sampling switch, by means of a 6-bit Digital-to-Analog-Converter (DAC). Simulations of a 2-channel TI-ADC running at fs= 4GHz shows the effectiveness of the correction. The spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is improved from 44.63 dB to 83.12 dB for a sine-wave just below the Nyquist frequency(fNyquist) of 2 GHz.

We examine whether the recent expansions in Medicaid from the Affordable Car Act reduced "employment lock" among childless adults who were previously ineligible for public coverage. We compare employment in states that chose to expand Medicaid versus those that chose not to expand, before and after implementation. We find that although the expansion increased Medicaid coverage by 3.0 percentage points among childless adults, there was no significant impact on the employment.

We examine how a 16-week cut in potential unemployment insurance (UI) duration in Missouri affected search behavior of UI recipients and the aggregate labor market. Using a regression discontinuity...

We estimate the effect of new unionization on firms’ equity value over the 1961-1999 period using a newly assembled sample of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections matched to stock market data. Event-study estimates show an average union effect on the equity value of the firm equivalent to a cost of at least $40,500 per unionized worker. At the same time, point estimates from a regression-discontinuity design – comparing the stock market impact of close union election wins to close losses – are considerably maller and close to zero. We find a negative relationship between the cumulative abnormal returns and the vote share in support of the union, allowing us to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings. Using the magnitudes from the analysis, we calibrate a structural “median voter†model of endogenous union determination in order to conduct counterfactual policy simulations of policies that would marginally increase the ease of unionization.