Subsidies on Labour and Capital under Wage Bargaining

ABSTRACT: Micro-policy instruments are often grouped into labour subsidies and capital subsidies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect on employment of labour and capital subsidies when the wage rate is endogeneous. The problem is studied within a sequential three-stage model, integrating the investment decision, wage-bargaining and the employment decision. The paper demonstrates that labour subsidies may fail, depending on technology and the risk aversion of the workers.     

Endowment effects in the risky investment game?

Theory and Decision - The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (Q J Econ 112(2):631–645, 1997) has been proposed as a simple tool to measure risk aversion in applied settings,...     

Functional Assessment and Intervention for Organizational Behavior Change: Improving the Timeliness of Staff Meetings at a Human Services Organization

We implemented functional behavioral assessment (FBA) at a human services organization to reduce the tardiness of scheduled staff meetings. Following baseline, FBA focused on antecedent and consequence conditions that affected staff arriving on time to scheduled meetings. These data were subsequently presented at a staff meeting in which staff planned an intervention to improve the timeliness of meetings. The intervention, composed of premeeting reminders, positive reinforcement for arriving on time, and meeting termination criteria (to facilitate meeting-to-meeting transitions), was implemented in a multiple baseline design across 3 types of meetings. As a result of the intervention, the number of minutes late that meetings started decreased. We discuss FBA within organizational behavior management that targets performance improvement objectives.     

Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality

This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the “reality of the message,” in which gestures from the other both signify and excite/seduce, and an enlarged meaning of seduction. The child's translation of the enigmatic messages conveyed by the adult is a process of being seduced into building interiority and subjectivity. In effect, the present paper proposes not only that “otherness” constitutes the subject, but that an “asymmetrical intersubjectivity” is what enables the transition from instinct to drive and the creation of paradoxical human sexuality. In a meditation that illuminates significant issues in American feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Laplanche's essay analyzes and distinguishes three interrelated terms, gender, sex, and “the sexual” (“le sexual”), or so-called “infantile sexuality”, the latter documenting a Freudian and French emphasis on an additional, counter-realistic, counter-adaptational, and counter-social conception of sexuality. What stands out in this paper no less than “le sexual” is the use of the term “gender” by a French psychoanalyst, who is at once nodding in acknowledgment to contemporary American thinking, and enlisting the concept of gender to reaffirm its “intimate enemy,” infantile sexuality, “le sexual.” Laplanche sees the American-conceived couple sex/gender as a “formidable tool against the Freudian discovery.” Formidableness is what is common to gender and to infantile sexuality, in that both concepts resist and destroy the clear-cut biological/anatomical “destiny” of sex. Both pertain to cultural/acquired/constructed aspects of sexuality; both are phantasmatic and both subvert sexual role divisions. But gender is organized by, hence possibly subordinate to, sex. Laplanche acknowledges gender yet at the same time he makes it dependent on sexuality and thereby “downgrades” it in favor of the inarticulate, perverse, subversive, untameable aspect of human sexuality—“le sexual”, infantile sexuality—which remains outside and in excess of gender.     

Cross-Currents in Practice,Undergraduate, and Graduate Education in Social Work

Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale was administered to master's level social work students at the beginning, midpoint, and end of their two-year educational program to determine the impact of social work education on the vital personality ingredient, open-mindedness. Scores were also used to compare levels of performance in the practicum at the conclusion of training. Students were found to be significantly more open-minded at the conclusion of training, indicating greater student permeability than indicated by previous studies. The mean performance level of open-minded students was not significantly different from that of the closed-minded group.     

Bivariate compound poisson distributions

This paper discusses four alternative methods of forming bivariate distributions with compound Poisson marginals. Basic properties of each bivariate version are given. A new bivariate negative binomial distribution, and four bivariate versions of the Sichel distribution, are defined and their properties given.