Equilibrium in Matching Models with Employment Dependent Productivity

In a standard search and matching framework, the labor market presents frictions while in the competitive product market the demand is infinitely elastic.To have a more realistic framework, some models abandon the assumption of infinite elasticity and consider a two-tier productive scheme in the goods market. In this paper, I establish the conditions that are sufficient for the existence and the uniqueness of a steady-state equilibrium for this kind of models. I also notice that some standard assumptions about the production and matching technology (a Cobb-Douglas function) do not fulfill such conditions and so may hinder the existence of an equilibrium.Unemployment, search-matching equilibrium.

Complementarities and substitutabilities in matching models

This paper describes an equilibrium matching model with two types of workers producing two different intermediate goods. Labour markets are perfectly segmented, but productive complementarities between sectors and productive substitutability within sectors arise. This deeply changes the effects of labour market policies. A welfare analysis is also conducted. Under constant returns to scale in the matcing technology, the so-called Hosios condition is sufficient to guarantee the efficiency of the decentralized equilibrium.

Employment subsidies and substitutable skills : An equilibrium matching approach

This search-matching model is well suited for an equilibrium evaluation of labor market policies. When those policies are targeted on some groups, the usual juxtaposition of labor markets is however a shortcoming. There is a need for a setting where workers’ productivity depends on employment levels in all markets. This paper provides such a theoretical setting. We first develop a streamlined model and then show that it can be extended to deal with interactions among various labor market and fiscal policies. Simulation results focus on the effects of employment subsidies and in-work benefits and on their interactions with the profile of unemployment benefits and with active labor market programs.Unemployment; search-matching equilibrium; wage bargaining; reductions of social security contributions; unemployment insurance; labor market programs

Earthquake in the city: the people yet to come

The paper starts a critical reflection on the effects of disasters on urban change. It is a compendium of the discussions, meetings and fieldworks of the research team Energie Sisma Emilia at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. The fieldwork included a one-day walking-and-photographs (April 2015) in the town centre of Mirandola. This is one of the towns that Energie Sisma Emilia chose to evaluate since it was heavily affected by the earthquakes of May 2012. The working research question concerns post-disaster city change and possible gentrification of old town centres. Migrants\u2014counted as much as one third of the resident population in our case study\u2014found a sanctuary of affordable rents in old town centre of Mirandola, prior to its reconstruction. From discourse analysis of planning documents, there is a sense that a certain imaginary city was already in place before the earthquake. If this is the case, we consider the possibility that post-disaster politics might be determinant in displacement of migrant population. The paper begins by looking at three frameworks drawn from the 'Sociology of Disasters' and by making a tempting parallel with three analytical perspectives on cities: city as a container, city of assemblages, and city as a futurity. In the central part, it opens to gentrification debate and to the multiple dimensions of urban displacement. The field notes and photographs of the walk in Mirandola are discussed at the end as very first empirical findings or, rather, initial scoping for a longitudinal research endeavour

Evaluating Effectiveness of Modeling Motion System Feedback in the Enhanced Hess Structural Model of the Human Operator

In order to use the Hess Structural Model to predict the need for certain cueing systems, George and Cardullo significantly expanded it by adding motion feedback to the model and incorporating models of the motion system dynamics, motion cueing algorithm and a vestibular system. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate effectiveness of these innovations by performing a comparison analysis of the model performance with and without the expanded motion feedback. The proposed methodology is composed of two stages. The first stage involves fine-tuning parameters of the original Hess structural model in order to match the actual control behavior recorded during the experiments at NASA Visual Motion Simulator (VMS) facility. The parameter tuning procedure utilizes a new automated parameter identification technique, which was developed at the Man-Machine Systems Lab at SUNY Binghamton. In the second stage of the proposed methodology, an expanded motion feedback is added to the structural model. The resulting performance of the model is then compared to that of the original one. As proposed by Hess, metrics to evaluate the performance of the models include comparison against the crossover models standards imposed on the crossover frequency and phase margin of the overall man-machine system. Preliminary results indicate the advantage of having the model of the motion system and motion cueing incorporated into the model of the human operator. It is also demonstrated that the crossover frequency and the phase margin of the expanded model are well within the limits imposed by the crossover model