Hasil untuk "Labor policy. Labor and the state"

M. Fisk, C. Offe, John L. Keane

Claus Offe is one of the leading social scientists working in Germany today, and his work, particularly on the welfare state, has been enormously influential both in Europe and the United States. "Contradictions of the Welfare State" is the first collection of Offe's essays to appear in a single volume in English, and it contains a selection of his most important recent work on the breakdown of the post-war settlement. The political writings in this book are primarily concerned with the origins of the present difficulties - what Offe calls the 'crises of crisis management' - of welfare capitalist states. He indicates why in the present period, these states are no longer capable of fully managing the socio-political problems and conflicts generated by late capitalist societies and discusses the viability of New Right, corporatist, and democratic socialist proposals for restructuring the welfare state. The book also offers fresh and penetrating insights into a range of other subjects, including social movements, political parties, law, social policy, and labor markets. There is an interview with Claus Offe, prepared especially for this volume, and a substantial introductory chapter by John Keane which links the essays and explores Offe's central themes. Claus Offe has researched and lectured widely throughout Europe and North America and is Professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. John Keane is an editor of Telos and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Sociology at the Polytechnic of Central London. This book is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

David Tolpin

We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return, yielding a posterior distribution whose modes coincide with return-maximizing solutions while posterior dispersion represents uncertainty over optimal behavior. To approximate this posterior in discrete domains, we adapt variational sequential Monte Carlo (VSMC) to inference over deterministic policies under stochastic dynamics, introducing a sweep that enforces policy consistency across revisited states and couples transition randomness across particles to avoid confounding from simulator noise. Acting is performed by posterior predictive sampling, which induces a stochastic control policy through a Thompson-sampling interpretation rather than entropy regularization. Across grid worlds, Blackjack, Triangle Tireworld, and Academic Advising, we analyze the structure of inferred policy distributions and compare the resulting behavior to discrete Soft Actor-Critic, highlighting qualitative and statistical differences that arise from policy-level uncertainty.

Kim Weston

Universal basic income (UBI) is a tax scheme that uniformly redistributes aggregate income amongst the entire population of an economy. We prove the existence of an equilibrium in a model that implements universal basic income. The economic agents choose the proportion of their time to work and earn wages that can be used towards consumption and investment in a financial market with a traded stock and annuity. A proportion of the earned wages is uniformly distributed amongst all agents, leading to interconnectedness of the agents' decision problems, which are already dependent on one another through the financial market. The decision problems are further entangled by Nash perceptions of labor; the agents respond to the labor choices of others and act upon their perceived income in their decision problems. The equilibrium is constructed and proven to exist using a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) approach for a BSDE system with a quadratic structure that decouples. We analyze the effects of a universal basic income policy on labor market participation, the stock market, and welfare. While universal basic income policies affect labor market participation and welfare monotonically, its effects on the stock market are nontrivial and nonmonotone.

N. V. Bashkireva

Relevance . For the past few years, the judicial authorities of Russia and Belarus have been conducting investigations into the "timeless" crimes committed by the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War, which are classified as genocide against the Soviet people. The study of the genocidal and scorchedearth policies implemented by the occupiers is currently an important area of research in Russian and Belarusian historiography. The lack of coverage of the involvement of French soldiers and officers in these policies makes this research particularly relevant. The purpose of the article – based on the analysis of archival documents, some of which have been introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, to determine the circumstances of the participation of members of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism in war crimes on the territory of the Byelorussian SSR during the Great Patriotic War. Objectives : to identify the historical conditions of the participation of French legionnaires in the genocide of the Belarusian people during the war; to determine the types of war crimes committed by the French in the occupied territory of Belarus. Methodology . The research is based on the principles of historicism and objectivity. General scientific (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, classification method) and special historical methods are used: historical-genetic and historical-comparative. Results . The study established the circumstances of the participation of French Legionnaires in the implementation of the Nazi policy of genocide in the occupied territory of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War. It identified the types of war crimes committed by French soldiers and officers against civilians in 1942-1944. Conclusions . French legionnaires, as part of the Wehrmacht's security divisions, were directly involved in the implementation of the Nazi policy of genocide against the civilian population in Belarus, both during large-scale antipartisan operations and during independent raids and "cleansings." In addition to their involvement in the burning of villages, murders, rapes, and the forced deportation of local residents to forced labor in Germany, French soldiers were also known for their systematic looting and plundering.

Ricardo Alonzo Fernández Salguero

This paper develops a new generation of the Keynesian Intertemporal Synthesis (KIS) Model, a macroeconomic framework designed to reconcile the empirical strengths of the Post-Keynesian (PK) and New Keynesian (NK) traditions. The central innovation of this work is the abandonment of the traditional Cobb-Douglas production function in favor of a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) specification. This modification is directly motivated by the compelling evidence from the meta-analysis by Gechert et al. (2021), which emphatically rejects the hypothesis of a unit elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. We integrate this finding with the conclusions from a wide range of meta-analyses on the state-dependent heterogeneity of fiscal multipliers (Gechert and Rannenberg, 2018), the productivity of public capital (Bom and Ligthart, 2014), the effectiveness hierarchy of spending instruments (Gechert, 2015), and the empirical failure of Ricardian Equivalence (Stanley, 1998). The resulting KIS-CES model, while based on intertemporal optimization, incorporates household heterogeneity, non-standard preferences that value wealth and penalize debt, and a monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound. The mathematical derivations reveal that the elasticity of substitution, calibrated to an empirically plausible value of $σ< 1$, becomes a key parameter that modulates income distribution and magnifies the crowding-in effect of public investment. The model generates an endogenous MPC, a nonlinear fiscal multiplier that increases dramatically in crises, and a multiplier for public investment that is structurally higher than that for consumption, thus offering a unified, rigorous, and, above all, empirically disciplined theoretical framework.

Haoyu Wei

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target policy is estimated as optimal, particularly when the optimal policy is non-unique or nearly deterministic. We study inference for the value of optimal policies in Markov decision processes. We characterize the existence of the efficient influence function and show that non-regularity arises under policy non-uniqueness. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a novel \textit{N}onparametric \textit{S}equenti\textit{A}l \textit{V}alue \textit{E}valuation (NSAVE) method, which achieves semiparametric efficiency and retains the double robustness property when the optimal policy is unique, and remains stable in degenerate regimes beyond the scope of existing asymptotic theory. We further develop a smoothing-based approach for valid inference under non-unique optimal policies, and a post-selection procedure with uniform coverage for data-selected optimal policies. Simulation studies support the theoretical results. An application to the OhioT1DM mobile health dataset provides patient-specific confidence intervals for optimal policy values and their improvement over observed treatment policies.

Artem Serheiev

The article explores the issue of managing banks’ financial results under conditions of armed aggression, which creates an unprecedented level of risk for Ukraine’s banking system. The relevance of the study lies in the need for adaptive management approaches to ensure bank profitability and solvency in crisis settings. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of managing financial results of systemically important Ukrainian banks during 2022–2025 and to determine the key factors of their resilience under wartime risks. The research is based on a comparative analysis of the performance of four banks. A retrospective assessment of financial indicators, asset and liability structures, credit and deposit policies, and provisioning levels was conducted. The methodological framework includes dynamic and structural analysis, as well as generalization of banks’ adaptation strategies. The study summarizes the changes in profitability, proves the high level of bank resilience during wartime, and systematizes financial adaptation strategies. It is found that profitability indicators in 2023-2025 exceeded pre-war levels, while asset structures shifted toward low-risk instruments. Differences between state-owned and private bank management models are characterized. Key factors ensuring liquidity and solvency are identified. The state’s role in stabilizing the sector through nationalization, liquidity support, and deposit guarantees is assessed. Theoretical value lies in clarifying factors of financial resilience under extraordinary conditions. Practical value includes the applicability of results in forming anti-crisis financial strategies. Scientific novelty lies in the systemic analysis of empirical data from 2022–2025 across different banking models. The link between asset structure and profitability stability is established. Further research should focus on smaller banks and the impact of digital risks. Article type: empirical.

Вікторія Близнюк, Л. Д. Яценко

Human capital is a driver of socio-economic development, which significantly actualizes the need to study the conditions of its formation. The study is devoted to the systematization of risks and consequences of deterioration of the quality of the societal system as a whole and its separate component - human capital, whose evolutionary development forms new qualitative characteristics of the societal system. Violation of the balance of functioning of institutional subjects of the social order leads to anomalies. Given that the societal structure of society is never a simple return to the previous “norm”, the authors substantiate the expediency of considering the architectonics of human capital quality in post-war development in the coordinates characterizing the relevant sections of the societal system, namely: systemic, existential and socio-psychological. This approach allowed us to identify the peculiarities of ensuring the quality of human capital in each of the coordinate systems. The analysis of the current situation in Ukraine shows that the risks generated in the labor, demographic, educational spheres and the risks associated with the availability and quality of medical services are of particular concern. It is noted that the peculiarities of the manifestation of modern risks are the deterioration of the demographic situation, the reduction of the possibilities of reproduction of human capital, the violation of balances in the labor market, the decline in the welfare of the population, the deterioration of the financial condition of social benefit funds and the high level of burden on them. Risks give rise to the possibility of negative changes, create the danger of dysfunction of social institutions, inhibition of social reproduction, production processes, transmission of social norms and values; formation of social instability and tension. Identification of a number of problems of accumulation and use of human assets in the context of a prolonged war allowed the authors to systematize the risks and consequences of ensuring favorable conditions for the formation of human capital in the face of its significant losses. This made it possible to outline the priority vectors of state policy in the field of human capital reproduction.

Wenjia Meng, Qian Zheng, Long Yang et al.

Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy data. However, these methods suffer from the high variance of the off-policy policy gradient (OPPG) estimator, which results in poor sample efficiency during training. In this paper, we propose an off-policy policy gradient method with the optimal action-dependent baseline (Off-OAB) to mitigate this variance issue. Specifically, this baseline maintains the OPPG estimator's unbiasedness while theoretically minimizing its variance. To enhance practical computational efficiency, we design an approximated version of this optimal baseline. Utilizing this approximation, our method (Off-OAB) aims to decrease the OPPG estimator's variance during policy optimization. We evaluate the proposed Off-OAB method on six representative tasks from OpenAI Gym and MuJoCo, where it demonstrably surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the majority of these tasks.

Yaozhong Gan, Renye Yan, Xiaoyang Tan et al.

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies is constrained. This paper introduces a novel off-policy extension to the original PPO method, christened Transductive Off-policy PPO (ToPPO). Herein, we provide theoretical justification for incorporating off-policy data in PPO training and prudent guidelines for its safe application. Our contribution includes a novel formulation of the policy improvement lower bound for prospective policies derived from off-policy data, accompanied by a computationally efficient mechanism to optimize this bound, underpinned by assurances of monotonic improvement. Comprehensive experimental results across six representative tasks underscore ToPPO's promising performance.

P. Beramendi, Silja Häusermann, Herbert P. Kitschelt et al.

1. Introduction: the politics of advanced capitalism Pablo Beramendi, Silja Hausermann, Herbert Kitschelt and Hanspeter Kriesi Part I. Structural Transformations: 2. Prosperity and the evolving structure of advanced economies Carles Boix 3. The origins of dualism David Rueda, Erik Wibbels and Melina Altamirano 4. Occupational structure and labor market change in Western Europe since 1990 Daniel Oesch 5. Globalization, labor market risks, and class cleavage Rafaela Dancygier and Stefanie Walter 6. The return of the family Gosta Esping-Andersen Part II. Politics: 7. Party alignments: change and continuity Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm 8. What do voters want? Dimensions and configurations in individual-level preferences and party choice Silja Hausermann and Hanspeter Kriesi 9. Trade unions and the future of democratic capitalism Anke Hassel Part III. Policies: 10. Post-industrial social policy Evelyne Huber and John Stephens 11. The dynamics of social investment: human capital, activation, and care Jane Gingrich and Ben Ansell 12. Stability and change in CMEs: corporate governance and industrial relations in Germany and Denmark Gregory Jackson and Kathleen Thelen Part IV. Outcomes: 13. Constrained partisanship and economic outcomes Pablo Beramendi 14. Happiness and the welfare state: decommodification and the political economy of subjective wellbeing Christopher J. Anderson and Jason D. Hecht 15. Conclusion: advanced capitalism in crisis Pablo Beramendi, Silja Hausermann, Herbert Kitschelt and Hanspeter Kriesi.

Dil Khatri, Dil Khatri, Kristina Marquardt et al.

Over the last three decades, Nepal has experienced a rapid transition in rural livelihoods, from largely subsistence farming to more diversified off-farm employment and remittances. Despite this, subsistence farming continues to be a central part of rural production. Why does farming persist in the face of other, more remunerative, off-farm employment options? In this article we argue that subsistence food production continues to be important for rural livelihood security by providing food needs from farming, thus helping households to cope with uncertainties in off-farm employment and international labor migration. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of a high level of livelihood stress, the paper provides insights and further explanations on the logic of maintaining subsistence food production as part of rural households' livelihood security. Drawing on in-depth qualitative study, complemented with a quantitative survey from eight villages in rural Nepal, we examine the impact of the pandemic on farming and off-farm activities and explore the reasons behind peoples' choice of livelihood strategies and how these vary between different social groups. We show that there was only limited impact of the dramatic disruptions caused by the global pandemic on subsistence farming, however it brought substantial challenges for emerging semi-commercial farming and off-farm incomes, including both local and migratory wage labor. During the pandemic, people increased their reliance on locally produced food, and subsistence farming served as a critical safety net. Our analysis underscores the continued importance of subsistence production amidst contemporary shifts toward off-farm employment among rural households. We also find a growing interest in semi-commercial farming among farmers with better access to land who seek state support to develop such production. This suggests that it is important for agricultural development policy to recognize and support subsistence farming alongside emerging commercial agriculture production as an integral foundation of future farming and rural livelihood security.

Carolina Martínez Moreno

La delimitación del ámbito del Derecho del Trabajo y la definición de los contornos del concepto de trabajo asalariado corresponde a la competencia de los Estados y, por consiguiente, a sus respectivos ordenamientos. De modo que el Derecho Social de la UE únicamente se encargaría de aportar algunas referencias meramente instrumentales con la finalidad de garantizar el efecto útil de cada norma. Sin embargo, con el paso del tiempo, esa reconstrucción plural y fragmentaria del concepto que lleva a cabo el TJUE a través del método de casos permitiría advertir que se ha ido conformando una noción verdaderamente autónoma y expansiva de trabajador. Lo que persigue este modesto estudio es, no tanto un recorrido exhaustivo por esa construcción jurisprudencial del concepto de trabajador, cuanto —a propósito de las sentencias referidas a consejeros y administradores de sociedades mercantiles de capital— dar respuesta a un par de preguntas: la primera, si ello ha podido pulverizar nuestra jurisprudencia sobre la teoría del vínculo como criterio delimitador de los consejeros ejecutivos y la alta dirección laboral; y, con ello, dejar seriamente tocada la exclusión del art.1.3 c) ET. La segunda, si tiene sentido la laboralización de ese privilegiado colectivo.

Marina V. Nemytina, Alexey B. Krasnov

The article analyzes the experience of the concession policy implementation by the RSFSR and the USSR during the 20s of the twentieth century and the approaches used in its framework, which allowed solving simultaneously a wide range of tasks related to the rise of the domestic economy and overcoming foreign policy isolation. This experience of the Soviet state can be used to solve the challenges the Russian Federation is facing today. The authors substantiate that the concession policy of the Soviet state was a rationally constructed mechanism able to solve a number of tasks. 1) Creation of foreign concessions in the Soviet country contributed to withdrawal from the diplomatic blockade declared by Western countries. 2) Through the concession policy the obligations of the Russian Empire to foreign investors were renewed in the conditions of a socialist economy. 3) By creating concessions the Soviet government headed by V.I. Lenin attracted the material and technological resources of the European countries and the USA for the development of the economy of the Soviet country. 4) At concession enterprises models of industrial relations with a high level of labor organization and living conditions of workers were formed at the expense of foreign investors, which then had to be introduced everywhere. 5) The concession policy covered the national suburbs and contributed to unification of the economic potential of the republics as part of the USSR. The analysis of the legal regulation of concession relationships carried out in this article gives reason to suppose that the concession policy of the Soviet state should not be reduced to the NEP because its implementation started earlier. In fact, it was launched with the adoption of the Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of November 23, 1920 On General Economic and Legal Conditions for Concessions and within its framework a range of tasks that went far beyond the economic recovery envisaged by the NEP through private law principles was solved. Attention should also be paid to the constitutional nature of the regulation of concession legal relations, which was determined by the “Treaty on the USSR Foundation of 1922” and the Constitution of 1924.

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Fuminobu Okabe

Es un hecho bien conocido que los japoneses no suelen querer disfrutar de las vacaciones anuales retribuidas. Es cierto que la forma de trabajar japonesa dista mucho del sentido común en el mundo, pero ¿por qué se está dando este fenómeno? Para abordar este tema, examinaremos el problema desde tres perspectivas: (1) la singularidad del propio régimen japonés de vacaciones anuales, (2) los problemas que existen sobre cómo se opera e interpreta el régimen de vacaciones, y (3) la conciencia y valores de los japoneses hacia el trabajo. Sobre la base de estos análisis, señalaremos las perspectivas y mejoras requeridas para introducir un régimen general de vacaciones anuales retribuidas a nivel mundial en Japón.

Yu-An Lin, Chen-Tao Lee, Guan-Ting Liu et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interpretability. On the other hand, programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate RL tasks as synthesizing interpretable programs that can be executed in the environments. Despite encouraging results, these methods are limited to short-horizon tasks. On the other hand, representing RL policies using state machines (Inala et al., 2020) can inductively generalize to long-horizon tasks; however, it struggles to scale up to acquire diverse and complex behaviors. This work proposes the Program Machine Policy (POMP), which bridges the advantages of programmatic RL and state machine policies, allowing for the representation of complex behaviors and the address of long-term tasks. Specifically, we introduce a method that can retrieve a set of effective, diverse, and compatible programs. Then, we use these programs as modes of a state machine and learn a transition function to transition among mode programs, allowing for capturing repetitive behaviors. Our proposed framework outperforms programmatic RL and deep RL baselines on various tasks and demonstrates the ability to inductively generalize to even longer horizons without any fine-tuning. Ablation studies justify the effectiveness of our proposed search algorithm for retrieving a set of programs as modes.

Pascal Michaillat

Immigration is often blamed for increasing unemployment among local workers. This sentiment is reflected in the rise of anti-immigration parties and policies in Western democracies. And in fact, numerous studies estimate that in the short run, the arrival of new workers in a labor market raises the unemployment rate of local workers. Yet, standard migration models, such as the Walrasian model and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, inherently assume that immigrants are absorbed into the labor market without affecting local unemployment. This paper presents a more general model of migration that allows for the possibility that not only the wages but also the unemployment rate of local workers may be affected by the arrival of newcomers. This extension is essential to capture the full range of potential impacts of labor migration on labor markets. The model blends a matching framework with job rationing. In it, the arrival of new workers raises the unemployment rate among local workers, particularly in a depressed labor market where job opportunities are limited. On the positive side, in-migration helps firms fill vacancies more easily, boosting their profits. The overall impact of in-migration on local welfare varies with labor market conditions: in-migration reduces welfare when the labor market is inefficiently slack, but it enhances welfare when the labor market is inefficiently tight.

Zhenghao Xu, Xiang Ji, Minshuo Chen et al.

Policy gradient methods equipped with deep neural networks have achieved great success in solving high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, current analyses cannot explain why they are resistant to the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we study the sample complexity of the neural policy mirror descent (NPMD) algorithm with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Motivated by the empirical observation that many high-dimensional environments have state spaces possessing low-dimensional structures, such as those taking images as states, we consider the state space to be a $d$-dimensional manifold embedded in the $D$-dimensional Euclidean space with intrinsic dimension $d\ll D$. We show that in each iteration of NPMD, both the value function and the policy can be well approximated by CNNs. The approximation errors are controlled by the size of the networks, and the smoothness of the previous networks can be inherited. As a result, by properly choosing the network size and hyperparameters, NPMD can find an $ε$-optimal policy with $\widetilde{O}(ε^{-\frac{d}α-2})$ samples in expectation, where $α\in(0,1]$ indicates the smoothness of environment. Compared to previous work, our result exhibits that NPMD can leverage the low-dimensional structure of state space to escape from the curse of dimensionality, explaining the efficacy of deep policy gradient algorithms.

N. Freudenberg, Sara Goldrick-Rab, J. Poppendieck

Over the last decade, multiple studies of food insecurity among college students have found rates from 20% to more than 50%, considerably higher than the 12% rate for the entire US population.Reasons for higher rates of food insecurity among college students include a growing population of low-income college students, high college costs and insufficient financial aid, more financial hardship among many low- and moderate-income families, a weak labor market for part-time workers, declining per capita college resources, and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) policies that specifically exclude many college students from participation.This essay reviews the causes and consequences of food insecurity on campus, explores reasons for the low SNAP participation rate, and describes how campuses have responded to food insecurity. It summarizes federal, state, and local changes in SNAP policies that can facilitate college student participation and retention and suggests strategies for more robust and effective university responses to food insecurity, including SNAP enrollment campaigns, a stronger role for campus food services, and a redefinition of the goals and purposes of campus food pantries. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print October 17, 2019: e1-e7. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2019.305332).