Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) data for 2005–8, we find that unemployed persons who look for work online are re-employed about 25% faster than comparable workers who do not ...search online. This finding contrasts with previous results for 1998–2001, and is robust to controls for cognitive test scores and detailed indicators of Internet access. Internet job search (IJS) appears to be most effective in reducing unemployment durations when used to contact friends and relatives, to send out resumes or fill out applications and also to look at advertisements. We detect a weak positive relationship between IJS and wage growth between jobs.
GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN JOB ADS Kuhn, Peter; Shen, Kailing
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2013, Letnik:
128, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We study explicit gender discrimination in a population of ads on a Chinese Internet job board. Gender-targeted job ads are common, favor women as often as men, and are much less common in jobs ...requiring higher levels of skill. Employers’ relative preferences for female versus male workers, on the other hand, are more strongly related to the preferred age, height, and beauty of the worker than to job skill levels. Almost two thirds of the variation in advertised gender preferences occurs within firms, and one third occurs within firm*occupation cells. Overall, these patterns are not well explained by a firm-level animus model, by a glass-ceiling model, or by models in which broad occupational categories are consistently gendered across firms. Instead, the patterns suggest a model in which firms have idiosyncratic preferences for particular job-gender matches, which are overridden in skilled positions by factors such as thinner labor markets or a greater incentive to search broadly for the most qualified candidate.
We conduct a real-effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team-based pay. In contrast to tournaments, we find that women choose team-based pay at least as ...frequently as men in all our conditions and significantly more often in a well-defined subset of conditions. Women's greater attraction to co-operative incentives results in part from their more optimistic assessments of their prospective teammate's ability. Women also respond differently to alternative rules for team formation in a manner that is consistent with advantageous inequity aversion. In contrast, men show a greater responsiveness to efficiency gains associated with team production.
We estimate turnover costs in small retail sales teams using daily sales data and an advance notice requirement to address endogeneity concerns. In addition to short-staffing and onboarding costs, we ...identify two less familiar sources of turnover costs: incumbent workers’ recruitment activities and reductions in team morale after a departure is announced. Our estimates of total turnover costs are relatively modest, however: 10% higher turnover is about as costly as a 0.6% wage increase. We attribute these low costs to a set of complementary personnel policies that ensure that only 25% of departures result in a short-staffing spell.
We study how explicit employer requests for applicants of a particular gender enter the recruitment process on a Chinese job board, focusing on two questions: First, to what extent do employers’ ...requests affect the gender mix of a firm’s applicant pool? Second, how ‘hard’ are employers’ stated gender requests-- are they essential requirements, soft preferences, or something in between? Using internal data from a Chinese job board, we estimate that an explicit request for men raises men’s share in the applicant pool by 14.6 percentage points, or 26.4%; requests for women raises the female applicant share by 24.6 percentage points, or 55.0%. Men (women) who apply to gender-mismatched jobs also experience a substantial call-back penalty of 24 (43) percent. Thus, explicit gender requests do shape applicant pools, and signal a substantial but not absolute preference for the requested gender.
•Explicit requests for men (women) on a Chinese job board raise the male (female) share of applicants by 26.4%; (55.0%).•Men (women) who apply to gender-mismatched jobs experience a call-back penalty of 24 (43) percent.•Thus, explicit gender requests shape applicant pools and signal a substantial preference for the requested gender.
Dietary polyphenols protect against metabolic syndrome, despite limited absorption and digestion, raising questions about their mechanism of action. We hypothesized that one mechanism may involve the ...gut microbiota. To test this hypothesis, C57BL/6J mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD) containing 1% Concord grape polyphenols (GP). Relative to vehicle controls, GP attenuated several effects of HFD feeding, including weight gain, adiposity, serum inflammatory markers (tumor necrosis factor TNFα, interleukin IL-6, and lipopolysaccharide), and glucose intolerance. GP lowered intestinal expression of inflammatory markers (TNFα, IL-6, inducible nitric oxide synthase) and a gene for glucose absorption (Glut2). GP increased intestinal expression of genes involved in barrier function (occludin) and limiting triglyceride storage (fasting-induced adipocyte factor). GP also increased intestinal gene expression of proglucagon, a precursor of proteins that promote insulin production and gut barrier integrity. 16S rRNA gene sequencing and quantitative PCR of cecal and fecal samples demonstrated that GP dramatically increased the growth of Akkermansia muciniphila and decreased the proportion of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes, consistent with prior reports that similar changes in microbial community structure can protect from diet-induced obesity and metabolic disease. These data suggest that GP act in the intestine to modify gut microbial community structure, resulting in lower intestinal and systemic inflammation and improved metabolic outcomes. The gut microbiota may thus provide the missing link in the mechanism of action of poorly absorbed dietary polyphenols.
Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMW to lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery ...winners and their neighbors. Consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, the effects on winners' consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables. Consistent with the theory of in-kind transfers, the vast majority of BMW winners liquidate their BMWs. We do, however, detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings: PCL nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants. JEL: D14, D91, H23, H27 PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
•We study the effects of the Nutricate receipt, introduced at a fast food chain.•The receipt makes personalized recommendations to switch to healthier items.•The receipts shifted the mix of items ...purchased toward the healthier alternatives.•The results illustrate the health-improving potential of ‘smart’ micro-marketing.
We study the effects of the Nutricate receipt, which makes personalized recommendations to switch from unhealthy to healthier items at a restaurant chain. We find that the receipts shifted the mix of items purchased toward the healthier alternatives. For example, the share of adult main dishes requesting “no sauce” increased by 6.8 percent, the share of kids’ meals with apples (instead of fries) rose by 7.0 percent and the share of breakfast sandwiches without sausage increased by 3.8 percent. The results illustrate the potential of emerging information technologies, which allow retailers to tailor product marketing to individual consumers, to generate healthier choices.
We study worker behavior in an efficiency‐wage environment in which coworkers’ wages can influence a worker’s effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ responsiveness to coworkers’ ...wages should lead profit‐maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments, by contrast, show that while workers’ effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages, effort is not affected by coworkers’ wages. This casts doubt on the notion that workers’ concerns with equity might explain pay policies such as wage compression or wage secrecy.
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are targeted by ∼30-40% of marketed drugs, and their key roles in normal physiology and in disease demonstrate that an understanding of their structure and ...function is valuable to researchers in both basic science and drug discovery. However, until recently, detailed structural information on this protein family was limited by challenges in X-ray crystallographic analysis of such membrane proteins. The GPCR Network was created in 2010 with the goal of structurally characterizing 15-25 representative human GPCRs within 5 years, based on an active outreach programme addressing an interdisciplinary community of scientists interested in GPCR structure, chemistry and biology. Here, we provide an overview of how this collaborative effort has enabled the structural determination and characterization of eight human GPCRs so far, and discuss some of the challenges that remain in gaining more detailed insights into structure-function relationships in this receptor superfamily.
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