DO WAGE CUTS DAMAGE WORK MORALE? EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL FIELD EXPERIMENT

Employment contracts are often incomplete, leaving many responsibilities subject to workers' discretion. High work morale is therefore essential for sustaining voluntary cooperation and high productivity in firms. We conducted a field experiment to test whether workers reciprocate wage cuts and raises with low or high work productivity. Wage cuts had a detrimental and persistent impact on productivity, reducing average output by more than 20%. An equivalent wage increase, however, did not result in any productivity gains. The results from an additional control experiment with high monetary performance incentives demonstrate that workers could still produce substantially more output, leaving enough room for positive reactions. Altogether, these results provide evidence consistent with a model of reciprocity, as opposed to inequality aversion.     

Representing preorders with injective monotones

Theory and Decision - We introduce a new class of real-valued monotones in preordered spaces, injective monotones. We show that the class of preorders for which they exist lies in between the class...     

Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression‐Discontinuity Designs

In the regression‐discontinuity (RD) design, units are assigned to treatment based on whether their value of an observed covariate exceeds a known cutoff. In this design, local polynomial estimators are now routinely employed to construct confidence intervals for treatment effects. The performance of these confidence intervals in applications, however, may be seriously hampered by their sensitivity to the specific bandwidth employed. Available bandwidth selectors typically yield a “large” bandwidth, leading to data‐driven confidence intervals that may be biased, with empirical coverage well below their nominal target. We propose new theory‐based, more robust confidence interval estimators for average treatment effects at the cutoff in sharp RD, sharp kink RD, fuzzy RD, and fuzzy kink RD designs. Our proposed confidence intervals are constructed using a bias‐corrected RD estimator together with a novel standard error estimator. For practical implementation, we discuss mean squared error optimal bandwidths, which are by construction not valid for conventional confidence intervals but are valid with our robust approach, and consistent standard error estimators based on our new variance formulas. In a special case of practical interest, our procedure amounts to running a quadratic instead of a linear local regression. More generally, our results give a formal justification to simple inference procedures based on increasing the order of the local polynomial estimator employed. We find in a simulation study that our confidence intervals exhibit close‐to‐correct empirical coverage and good empirical interval length on average, remarkably improving upon the alternatives available in the literature. All results are readily available in R and STATA using our companion software packages described in Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik (2014d, 2014b).     

Returns to Tenure or Seniority?

This study documents two empirical facts using matched employer–employee data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm. Second, workers' wages rise with seniority, where seniority is defined as a worker's tenure relative to the tenure of his colleagues. Controlling for tenure, the probability of a worker leaving the firm decreases with seniority. The increase in expected seniority with tenure explains a large part of the negative duration dependence of the separation hazard. Conditional on ten years of tenure, the wage differential between the 10th and the 90th percentiles of the seniority distribution is 1.1–1.4 percentage points in Denmark and 2.3–3.4 in Portugal.     

A Reversal in the Relationship of Human Development With Fertility?

Myrskylä et al. (2009) found that the relationship between the human development index (HDI) and the total fertility rate (TFR) reverses from negative (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with decreases in TFR) to positive (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with increases in TFR) at an HDI level of 0.86. In this article, we show that the reversal in the HDI-TFR relationship is robust to neither the UNDP’s recent revision in the HDI calculation method nor thedecomposition of the HDI into its education, standard-of-living, and health subindices.     

Wer interessiert sich für eine Coachingweiterbildung?

The article describes the findings of a study of the motivations for pursuing extended vocational training, phases of career development and the structure of addressees based on professional training as a coach. The study showed that the central motive for a coaching training is supporting other people. Overall, instrumental motives are the most prevalent in this group of addressees. Looking at their individual career development, a clear picture emerges which places most of them in the professional establishment and maintenance phase. The addressees are predominantly highly qualified, as well as professionally and financially well positioned. A result of the training type classification indicates that the main incentive is to achieve work-related improvements from a stable personal career context.     

Social Work Doctoral Education in Australia: The Case for Further Development

ABSTRACT

Social work education in Australia has been based in universities since the 1940s. There are now 32 higher education providers offering social work programs across Australia. The significant growth in master’s level qualifying programs in Australia, along with recent higher education policy changes, has increased the need for social work academic faculty members with doctoral qualifications. This paper presents the findings of a scoping review of literature on social work doctoral education. Despite a growing literature on social work doctoral education in international contexts, the review found that there is a lack of Australian research and evidence on social work doctoral pedagogy, the number and diversity of doctoral students, the doctoral student experience, and doctoral graduate employment intentions and outcomes. Addressing the lack of Australian research in this area would be an important step to enabling Australian social work to address future research training and capacity needs and directions.

IMPLICATIONS

• There is a lack of research on Australian social work doctoral education and this is a neglected aspect of social work scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) research.

• Research into social work doctoral education would provide baseline information on the number and diversity of students, doctoral student experiences, graduate outcomes, and employment intentions.

• Development of social work SOTL about doctoral education would support future research capacity and enable the advancement of social work research knowledge and skills.

     

A consistency result in general censoring models

In this paper we prove a consistency result for sieved maximum likelihood estimators of the density in general random censoring models with covariates. The proof is based on the method of functional estimation. The estimation error is decomposed in a deterministic approximation error and the stochastic estimation error. The main part of the proof is to establish a uniform law of large numbers for the conditional log-likelihood functional, by using results and techniques from empirical process theory.     

Dienstleister der Finanzialisierung: Fragmentierte Organisation und kalkulierte Profite in der Immobilienwirtschaft

The financial crisis of 2007 has brought questions about the social order in capitalist societies back into the limelight. Economic sociology in particular emphasizes the growing influence of financial markets?? actors and logics. Most research focuses on macro phenomena or intra-organizational and individual perspectives. In contrast, concepts of financialization that explicitly take an inter-organizational perspective are in their infancy. Therefore, this article investigates the business and financing practices of a Europe-wide real estate firm. The historic case study shows the importance of service firms in the real estate sector and analyzes cooperation between different financial service firms (banks, estate agents, notaries, auditing firms, customers). Furthermore, it investigates how they jointly organize border-crossing and the relocation of legal liabilities and economic accountability. The article thus contributes to the current financialization debate in two ways: for one, it analyzes and explains inter-organizational cooperation between different service firms as being constitutive for financialization dynamics. For another, it points to the importance of calculative practices for establishing financialized corporations.     

Quality of experience in residential care programmes: Retrospective perspectives of former youth participants

This exploratory study examined perceptions of care quality within parent‐pay youth treatment programmes such as therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centres, wilderness therapy programmes, and intensive outpatient programmes. Reflecting on their personal experiences as youths, 214 adults reported on a total of 75 different treatment settings. Two indices developed for this study measured participants' perceptions of quality of experience and the totalistic programme characteristics of their care settings. Regression analyses and ANOVA tests of means indicated a negative relationship between totalistic programme characteristics and quality of experience index scores. Significant relationships were not found between quality of experience and forcible transport, intake decade, or the amount of time in treatment.