The impact of tax benefits on female labor supply and income distribution in Spain

Review of Economics of the Household - Tax benefits targeted to low-wage workers have become very common transfer programs that seek to meet both efficiency and equity targets. An expanding...     

Applying kaizen to the schedule in a concurrent environment

Not only ETO (Engineering to Order), but even serial production industry should know how to deal with projects and their schedule: plant commissioning, shutdown, introducing new products and similar circumstances should be managed with adequate planning and resource allocation techniques to create a schedule useful in decision making during the execution. The current complex reality, with evolving technologies and fierce pressure to reach the market as soon as possible, pushes the project managers to use more advanced techniques than waterfall planning, such as agile or lean. It also requires them to take a holistic view and manage concurrent tasks in complex projects. The contributions of this paper are two: the proposal to control specific parallel groups of waterfall activities under uncertain environments, which can lead to iterations and reworks, as a single concurrent Activity Managed by Kanban Methods (AMKM). This activity can be subsequently embedded into traditional scheduling approaches as CPM-PERT. The second contribution is the feasibility of its application in industrial environments due to the affordability of simulation software. Two use cases are shown as evidence. It is not a disruptive proposal, but a kaizen action based on very mature technologies. Finally, it is suggested some improvements to be implemented in Project Management Software due to this ‘kaizen’ proposal.     

Existence and Nash implementation of efficient sharing rules for a commonly owned technology

Suppose that a group of individuals owns collectively a technology which produces a consumption good by means of a (possibly heterogeneous) input. A sharing rule associates input contributions with a vector of consumptions that are technologically feasible. We show that the set of allocations obtained by any continuous sharing rule contains Pareto efficient allocations. We also present a mechanism that implements in Nash equilibrium the Pareto efficient allocations contained in an arbitrary sharing rule. Received: 29 June 1998/Accepted: 15 November 2000     

Suicide Attempts by Adolescent Latinas: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Family Correlates

Epidemiological data show high rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Latinas. Few studies have addressed the psychosocial, cultural and family correlates of suicide attempts among this age group of a rapidly growing population. The authors studied 31 adolescent Hispanic females who were receiving mental health services; 14 girls had attempted suicide in the previous five years and 17 had never attempted suicide. The two groups of girls did not differ significantly with respect to demographic profiles, levels of depression, family type, acculturation, or self-esteem. However, as hypothesized, the mutuality between girls and their mothers was lower among suicide attempters. Maladaptive coping skills of withdrawal and wishful thinking were more commonly used by attempters, and non-attempters used emotional regulation and problem-solving more frequently. Findings are discussed within the context of the empirical and theoretical literature and implications for practice are considered.     

The Decline of Barriers to Immigrant Economic and Political Rights in the American States: 1977–20011

State governments exercise significant powers to regulate the economic and social activities of resident aliens. We review the laws of the six leading states of immigrant settlement regulating access of noncitizens to 23 occupations, updating existing studies from 1946–77. Citizenship requirements for these occupations have plummeted, a change we attribute to federal court decisions, advisory opinions of state attorneys general, and state legislative and administrative action. There are numerous additional citizenship requirements in the statutes of the six states, although these appear to be poorly enforced. The authority of states to regulate their political communities is the most important remaining constitutionally valid basis of citizenship requirements. States define their political community broadly, leading to questionable exclusions of noncitizens from important activities.     

Ergonomic factors and production target evaluation in eucalyptus timber harvesting operations in mountainous terrains

There are several forest operations involved in Eucalyptus timber harvesting. This study was carried out during brush-cutting; tree felling, bucking, delimbing, piling and manual extraction operations, with the following objectives: a) analyzing, ergonomically, two systems of brush-cutting: one manual and the other semi-mechanized, using two different machines; b) ergonomically evaluating three different brands of pruner machines used in delimbing felled trees. c) determining the feasible target of productivity as a function of ergonomic factors relevant to establish the time of resting pauses for workers in manual and semi-mechanized timber harvesting systems in mountainous terrain. Brush-cutting, either manual or semimechanized, is an activity carried out prior to timber harvesting. It is usually a hard work, with low productivity when compared with mechanized systems. Pruner machines have been used by forest companies, due to the great possibilities to improve productivity, quality and the health of workers. Ergonomics is a discipline that promotes the adequacy of work to the physical and mental characteristics of human beings, seeking to design production systems and products considering relevant aspects, including social, organizational and environmental factors. Companies should consider the ergonomic factor in the determination of daily worker production targets.     

Fast parallel $$\alpha $$-stable distribution function evaluation and parameter estimation using OpenCL in GPGPUs

\(\alpha \)-Stable distributions are a family of probability distributions found to be suitable to model many complex processes and phenomena in several research fields, such as medicine, physics, finance and networking, among others. However, the lack of closed expressions makes their evaluation analytically intractable, and alternative approaches are computationally expensive. Existing numerical programs are not fast enough for certain applications and do not make use of the parallel power of general purpose graphic processing units. In this paper, we develop novel parallel algorithms for the probability density function and cumulative distribution function—including a parallel Gauss–Kronrod quadrature—, quantile function, random number generator and maximum likelihood estimation of \(\alpha \)-stable distributions using OpenCL, achieving significant speedups and precision in all cases. Thanks to the use of OpenCL, we also evaluate the results of our library with different GPU architectures.     

Influence of door handles design in effort perception: accessibility and usability

The application of ergonomics in product design is essential to its accessibility and usability. The development of manual devices should be based on ergonomic principles. Effort perception analysis is an essential approach to understand the physical and subjective aspects of the interface. The objective of the present study was to analyze the effort perception during a simulated task with different door handles by Portuguese subjects of both genders and different ages. This transversal study agreed with ethical aspects. 180 subjects of both genders pertaining to three age groups have participated. Five door handles with different shapes were evaluated. A subjective numeric rating scale of 5 levels was used to evaluate the effort. For statistical analysis it was applied the Friedman non-parametric test. The results have showed no significant differences of effort perception in door handles "A" and "B"; "A" and "D"; and "D" and "C". Door handle "E" presented the lowest values of all. In general, there's an inverse relationship between the results of biomechanical studies and the effort perception of the same task activity. This shows that door handles design influence directly these two variables and can interfere in the accessibility and usability of these kinds of products.     

Are cutout handles used when available in real occupational settings? Description of grips and upper extremities movements during industrial box handling

In order to achieve better postures and decrease musculoskeletal risks adequate design of hand/box couplings for manual materials handling (MMH) are still needed. No studies evaluating upper limb movement thorough direct measurements during box handling in workplace were identified in the literature. In this study we describe the types of grip and movements adopted by ten workers when handling redesigned boxes with cutout handles between different heights on industrial pallets. The new handles were used by 90% of the workers through different types of grip. Electrogoniometric measurements showed relatively safe forearm and wrist movements, although elbow inadequate range of movement was recorded. Despite the good acceptance of the cutout by workers, the new design requires extra internal space in the boxes reducing applications for this alternative of box.