Households WTP for the Reliability of Gas Supply

26 p.

Employment comovements at the sectoral level over the business cycle

This paper extends the technique suggested by den Haan (2000) to investigate contemporaneous as well as lead and lag correlations among economic data for a range of forecast horizons. The technique provides a richer picture of the economic dynamics generating the data and allows one to investigate which variables lead or lag others and whether the lead or lag pattern is short term or long term in nature. The technique is applied to monthly sectoral level employment data for the U.S. and shows that among the ten industrial sectors followed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, six tend to lead the other four. These six have high correlations indicating that the structural shocks generating the data movements are mostly in common. Among the four lagging industries, some lag by longer intervals than others and some have low correlations with the leading industries indicating that these industries are partially influenced by structural shocks beyond those generating the six leading industries.

The Impact of Firm Level Contracting on Wage Levels and Inequality: Spain 1995-2002

This paper provides microeconomic evidence on the variation over time of the firm-specific wage premium in Spain from 1995 to 2002, and its impact on wage inequality. We make use of two waves of a detailed linked employer-employee data set. In addition, a new data set with financial information on firms is used for 2002 to control as flexibly as possible for differences in the performance of firms (aggregated at industry level). To our knowledge, there is no microeconomic evidence on the dynamics of the firm-specific wage premium for Spain or for any other country with a similar institutional setting. Our results suggest that there is a clear tendency towards centralization in the collective bargaining process in Spain over this seven-year period, that the firm-level contract wage premium undergoes a substantial decrease, particularly for women, and finally that the "centralization" observed in the collective bargaining process has resulted in a slight decrease in wage inequality.

The effect of firm-level contracts on the structure of wages: evidence from matched employer-employee data

Revised: 2006-11

Key business factors for eco-innovation: an overview of recent firm-level empirical studies

[EN] The increasing interest in eco-innovation or environmental innovation as a strategy not only to address the serious global environmental problems but also as a source of competitive advantages for companies and for the emergence of new business areas, leads us to try to identify the different factors that act as determinants of its development and adoption at the micro level.

A methodology for the semiautomatic annotation of EPEC-RolSem, a basque corpus labeled at predicative level following the PropBank-Verb Net model

In this article we describe the methodology developed for the semiautomatic annotation of EPEC-RolSem, a Basque corpus labeled at predicate level following the PropBank-VerbNet model. The methodology presented is the product of detailed theoretical study of the semantic nature of verbs in Basque and of their similarities and differences with verbs in other languages. As part of the proposed methodology, we are creating a Basque lexicon on the PropBank-VerbNet model that we have named the Basque Verb Index (BVI). Our work thus dovetails the general trend toward building lexicons from tagged corpora that is clear in work conducted for other languages. EPEC-RolSem and BVI are two important resources for the computational semantic processing of Basque; as far as the authors are aware, they are also the first resources of their kind developed for Basque. In addition, each entry in BVI is linked to the corresponding verb-entry in well-known resources like PropBank, VerbNet, WordNet, Levin’s Classification and FrameNet. We have also implemented several automatic processes to aid in creating and annotating the BVI, including processes designed to facilitate the task of manual annotation.

Optimally robust shortcuts to population inversion in two-level quantum systems

19 p.

Design, analysis and implementation of a versatile low level radio frequency system for accelerating cavities

179 p.