Return to work still possible after several years as a disability pensioner due to musculoskeletal disorders: a population-based study after new legislation in Sweden permitting "resting disability pension"

Different strategies have been used to stimulate a return to work (RTW) among individuals suffering from long-term ailments. In Sweden a new law on "resting disability pension" permits disability pensioners to go back to work without jeopardising their benefits. In this study different variables related to RTW during 2000 by means of this legislation were identified among disability pensioners with musculoskeletal disorders. Individuals in the study group, when compared to a control group, had more often been disability pensioners for several years, had additional education, estimated their previous job to have been physically strenuous to a lesser degree, were more satisfied with the treatment at the social insurance office and had a more positive self-image. This study shows that it may be meaningful to continue/resume rehabilitation efforts and to try to motivate an individual suffering from musculoskeletal disorders to return to work even after several years as a disability pensioner.     

Analysing the creation of apartheid for asylum seekers in the UK

This article provides an examination of the contradictory conceptions of community and the misrepresentation of economic migration which have informed the UK Labour government's ‘modernisation’ of immigration and asylum policy. It does so by providing an outline of the provisions of the 1999 UK Immigration and Asylum Act‐in particular the new support system for asylum seekers‐and by examining the thinking which informs and justifies the legislation. It argues that UK immigration and asylum policy has continued to draw on notions of community which, in an unacknowledged way, relate to the categories of nation and ‘race’. It also argues that asylum policy is built on an ideological construction of the ‘economic migrant’ which is wholly misleading and lacks any serious evidential support. The article concludes that there is a continued, although unacknowledged, adherence to a version of British nationalism based on an ‘imagined community’ of nation which has long racialised particular groups of migrants and their descendants. The result is to maintain and modernise the racism of UK immigration controls. Este artículo ofrece una examen de los conceptos contradictorios de comunidad y de la tergiversación de la migración por razones económicas que han informado la modernización de la política del gobierno laborista del Reino Unido en cuanto a inmigración y asilo. Facilita el examen por un resumen de las disposiciones de la ley 1999 UK Immigration and Asylum Act‐en particular el nuevo sistema de apoyo para los que buscan asilo‐y por un examen del pensar que informa y justifica la legislación. Sostiene que la política del Reino Unido en materia de inmigración y asilo sigue haciendo uso de nociones de comunidad que, de una manera no reconocida, están relacionadas con categorías de nación y raza. También sostiene que la política en cuanto a asilo se basa en una construcción ideológica del ‘migrante por razones económicas’ que es a la vez engañosa y falta de pruebas serias. El artículo concluye que existe una adhesión continua, pero no reconida, a una versión de británico que se basa en una ‘comunidad imaginada’ de nación que por mucho tiempo ha discriminado por raza a ciertos grupos de migrantes y a sus descendientes. El resultado es el mantener y modernizar el racismo del control de immigración del Reino Unido.     

JOB MARKET SIGNALING OF RELATIVE POSITION,OR BECKER MARRIED TO SPENCE

This paper considers a matching model of the labor market where workers, who have private information on their quality, signal to firms that also differ in quality. Signals allow assortative matching in which the highest‐quality workers send the highest signals and are hired by the best firms. Matching is considered both when wages are rigid (nontransferable utility) and when they are fully flexible (transferable utility). In both cases, equilibrium strategies and payoffs depend on the distributions of worker and firm types. This is in contrast to separating equilibria of the standard model, which do not respond to changes in supply or demand. With sticky wages, despite incomplete information, equilibrium investment in education by low‐ability workers can be inefficiently low, and this distortion can become worse in a more competitive environment. In contrast, with flexible wages, greater competition improves efficiency.     

Two Competing Models of How People Learn in Games

Reinforcement learning and stochastic fictitious play are apparent rivals as models of human learning. They embody quite different assumptions about the processing of information and optimization. This paper compares their properties and finds that they are far more similar than were thought. In particular, the expected motion of stochastic fictitious play and reinforcement learning with experimentation can both be written as a perturbed form of the evolutionary replicator dynamics. Therefore they will in many cases have the same asymptotic behavior. In particular, local stability of mixed equilibria under stochastic fictitious play implies local stability under perturbed reinforcement learning. The main identifiable difference between the two models is speed: stochastic fictitious play gives rise to faster learning.