DO FINANCIAL INCENTIVES AFFECT FIRMS’ DEMAND FOR DISABLED WORKERS?

A number of OECD countries aim to encourage work integration of disabled persons using quota policies. For instance, Austrian firms must provide at least one job to a disabled worker per 25 nondisabled workers and are subject to a tax if they do not. This “threshold design” provides causal estimates of the noncompliance tax on disabled employment if firms do not manipulate nondisabled employment; a lower and upper bound on the causal effect can be constructed if they do. Results indicate that firms with 25 nondisabled workers employ about 0.04 (or 12%) more disabled workers than without the tax; firms do manipulate employment of nondisabled workers but the lower bound on the employment effect of the quota remains positive; employment effects are stronger in low‐wage firms than in high‐wage firms; and firms subject to the quota of two disabled workers or more hire 0.08 more disabled workers per additional quota job. Moreover, increasing the noncompliance tax increases excess disabled employment, whereas paying a bonus to overcomplying firms slightly dampens the employment effects of the tax.     

Grassroots Support Organizations and Transformative Practices

ABSTRACT

This essay theorizes grassroots support organizations (GSOs) as empowerment-oriented development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots support as a growing field of community-based practice. It offers a conceptual definition of GSOs; specifies their organizational features, functions, and goals; and differentiates them from other public and private intermediary organizations. It also details the activities carried out by GSOs and suggests how these cohere into a model of grassroots support. The article discusses the challenging issues of financing, accountability, and scale faced by GSOs. Finally, it establishes the relevance of social work to grassroots support and GSOs as fields of study and practice.     

Pathological Gambling and Treatment Outcomes for Adults Age 50 or Older in Methadone Maintenance Treatment

This study examined the relationship of pathological gambling to negative treatment outcomes for methadone maintenance patients aged 50 or older. The study included 130 methadone maintenance patients. Pathological gambling was determined using the Lie-Bet, a screen for pathological gambling; the outcomes were remaining in treatment and negative urine screens for drug use. Twenty percent of the sample identified as pathological gamblers. Pathological gambling was unrelated to remaining in treatment or negative urine screens. Although pathological gambling had no adverse influence on these treatment outcomes, the prevalence of pathological gambling suggests that screening for it may provide insights about other concerns.     

Providing social security in a context of change: Experience and challenges in Latin America

Over the past two decades Latin America has experienced major demographic, economic and social changes. The trend towards accelerated ageing of the population in most countries, together with the financial restrictions faced by social protection systems, has brought sweeping changes in pension programmes. The new demographic and labour context presents challenges for these new programmes which, unless they make the necessary adaptations, will definitely be unable to attain their stated objective of providing universal coverage and eliminating poverty in old age. This article offers a general discussion of the processes that the region is undergoing, as well as the limitations and challenges imposed by existing welfare systems. Finally, it examines the options available to retain the objective of universal coverage and thus ensure the economic needs of the elderly population.     

Redistribution and labour supply

This paper explores the effect of personal income taxes on redistribution when labour supply reactions are taken into consideration. The results indicate that the classical non-behavioural results on redistribution are not necessarily satisfied in a more general behavioural framework. In this respect, it is shown that the relevant transition to measure redistribution is not the transition from the initial post-tax to the final post-tax income distribution, but rather from the more precise initial pre-tax to the final post-tax income distribution. In addition, the necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure redistribution in this wider setting are postulated, which helps determine the behavioural bias under alternative tax and labour supply models. This shows that the functional specification of labour supply may also affect the results.     

Approximation algorithms for <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-level stochastic facility location problems

In the k-level facility location problem (FLP), we are given a set of facilities, each associated with one of k levels, and a set of clients. We have to connect each client to a chain of opened facilities spanning all levels, minimizing the sum of opening and connection costs. This paper considers the k-level stochastic FLP, with two stages, when the set of clients is only known in the second stage. There is a set of scenarios, each occurring with a given probability. A facility may be opened in any stage, however, the cost of opening a facility in the second stage depends on the realized scenario. The objective is to minimize the expected total cost. For the stage-constrained variant, when clients must be served by facilities opened in the same stage, we present a \((4-o(1))\)-approximation, improving on the 4-approximation by Wang et al. (Oper Res Lett 39(2):160–161, 2011) for each k. In the case with \(k=2,\,3\), the algorithm achieves factors 2.56 and 2.78, resp., which improves the \((3+\epsilon )\)-approximation for \(k=2\) by Wu et al. (Theor Comput Sci 562:213–226, 2015). For the non-stage-constrained version, we give the first approximation for the problem, achieving a factor of 3.495 for the case with \(k = 2\), and \(2k-1+o(1)\) in general.     

Network management and associated firms’ outcomes: multilevel analysis in the southern Brazilian context

This article seeks to provide theoretical and managerial insights with respect to the following questions: What is the effect of network management on the outcomes of associated firms? Do these effects on outcomes vary among small-firm networks (SFNs)? Do these outcomes vary among associated firms within the same SFN? Which management elements are most influential in the variation of these SFN outcomes? To answer these questions, this study adopts a multilevel analytical approach using SFNs in southern Brazil that benefit from the Cooperation Networks Program, a local public policy initiative that supports the formation, development, and consolidation of SFNs. The findings suggest that the outcomes provided by the networks differ between networks but are similar for firms in the same network. They also indicate that strategy and processes at the network level are related to firms’ outcomes. These findings show that the influence of structure on firms’ outcomes varies among networks and that the market segment is the only network-level variable that is significantly related to firms’ outcomes.     

Teaching Decision Theory Proof Strategies Using a Crowdsourcing Problem

Teaching how to derive minimax decision rules can be challenging because of the lack of examples that are simple enough to be used in the classroom. Motivated by this challenge, we provide a new example that illustrates the use of standard techniques in the derivation of optimal decision rules under the Bayes and minimax approaches. We discuss how to predict the value of an unknown quantity, θ ∈ {0, 1}, given the opinions of n experts. An important example of such crowdsourcing problem occurs in modern cosmology, where θ indicates whether a given galaxy is merging or not, and Y₁, …, Y_n are the opinions from n astronomers regarding θ. We use the obtained prediction rules to discuss advantages and disadvantages of the Bayes and minimax approaches to decision theory. The material presented here is intended to be taught to first-year graduate students.     

Imagining Gender Research: Violence,Masculinity, and the Shop Floor

This paper starts by arguing that visual data enriches gender research in management and organizations. Through an analysis of drawings by factory shop‐floor workers, we show that organizational climate is interwoven with gender dynamics, that shop‐floor masculinity is not necessarily heterosexual, and that masculinity in the shop‐floor context includes oppression as an element of man's symbolic violence against man. We discuss the usefulness of this type of data in gender research in organizational analysis and explore the ways in which gender violence is expressed in organizations. Moreover, the drawings gathered at a newspaper printing site located in the North of England provide a means of showing the relationship between gender violence and the exercise of masculinities, sexuality and oppression. We conclude that the exercise of hegemonic masculinity is associated not only with sexuality but also with the oppression of subaltern enactments of masculinity.