985 research outputs found
The impact of cultural diversity on firm innovation: evidence from Dutch micro-data
Get PDFAn important question for firms and policy makers is whether the recruitment of foreign workers can boost innovation. Migration studies have demonstrated positive economic impacts of cultural diversity on productivity and innovation at the regional level, but the impacts at firm level are less well known. Merging data from four different sources, provided by Statistics Netherlands, we construct and analyze a unique linked employer-employee micro dataset of 4582 firms that includes qualitative information on firm innovation. We consider both the number of immigrants these firms employ and their cultural diversity. Potential endogeneity of migrant employment is addressed by an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the past geographic distribution of immigrants and the past culinary diversity of the municipality the firm is located in. We find robust evidence that firms employing relatively more migrants are less innovative. However, there is evidence of integration in that this effect is generally less strong or even absent for second generation immigrants. Moreover, firms employing a more diverse foreign workforce are more innovative, particularly in terms of product innovations. The benefits of diversity for innovation are more apparent in sectors employing relatively more skilled immigrants
Immigration and Innovation in European Regions
Get PDFThe pooling of people with diverse backgrounds in particular areas may boost the creation of new ideas, knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship and economic growth. In this paper we measure the impact of the size, skills and diversity of immigration on innovativeness of host regions. For this purpose we construct a panel of data on 170 regions in Europe (NUTS 2 level) for the period 1991-2001. Innovation outcomes are measured by means of the number and types of patent applications. Given the geographical concentration and subsequent diffusion of innovation activity, and the spatial selectivity of immigrant settlement patterns, we take account of spatial dependence and of endogeneity of immigrant settlement in the econometric modelling. We find that an increase in patent applications in a region is associated with (i) net immigration; (ii) the share of foreigners in the population of the region; (iii) the average skill level of the immigrants; and (iv) the cultural diversity of the immigrants. The magnitude of these effects varies between types of patents
Meta-Analysis of empirical evidence on the labour market: Impacts of immigration
Get PDFThe number of people who are living outside their country of birth has been increasing rapidly in recent decades to some 200 million globally. The arrival of a growing number of legal and illegal migrants has raised concerns in host countries about the 'absorption capacity' of the labour market. This has fuelled extensive empirical research, not only in traditional migrant-receiving countries, but also in other high and middle income countries that attract migrants. Studies have been undertaken previously to synthesize the conclusions of this empirical research by means of formal meta-analyses of the impact of immigration on the wages of native workers and on the level of employment (Longhi et al., 2005, 2007). While these studies have shown that the labour market impacts in terms of wages and employment are rather small, the sample of studies available to generate comparable effect sizes has been severely limited by heterogeneity in study approaches, ranging from the econometric analysis of cross-regional differences to general equilibrium models and time-series approaches. In this paper we take a more qualitative approach that considers a broad range of impacts, consisting of effects on wages, employment, unemployment and labour force participation. By trichotomizing outcomes simply as a positive, negative or indiscernible impact, a relatively large database can be constructed for meta-analysis. Techniques such as ordered probit regression modelling allow an assessment of the relationship between study conclusions and key study characteristics such as type of country, methodology, period of investigation and migrant group
Manuscripten van H.J. Schoemaker uit de periode 1946-1971: Deel D: Golven van het wateroppervlak
No full textD1: Golven van het wateroppervlak, grondformules in eerste benadering (1956) D2: Golfvervorming door wind; overzicht van de ontwikkelingen tot 1955 (1955) D3: Second-order effects in progressinve surface waves (1961) D4: Golven in stromend water (1960) D5: Diffractie (1950) D6: Investigations of the reflection of waves (1949)Hydraulic EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience
Author Correction: Long-range chiral exchange interaction in synthetic antiferromagnets
Get PDFIn the version of this Article originally published, the sentence ‘D.-S.H. wrote the paper with K.L., J.H. and M.K.’ in the author contributions was incorrect; it should have read ‘D.-S.H. wrote the paper with K.L., J.H., M.-H.J. and M.K.’ This has been corrected in the online versions of the Article
Analysis, design and fabrication of tapered integrated optical structures: Implementation of the fully vectorial 3-D beam propagation method
No full textApplied Science
Hardware Algorithms For Tile-Based Real-Time Rendering
No full textIn this dissertation, we present the GRAphics AcceLerator (GRAAL) framework for developing embedded tile-based rasterization hardware for mobile devices, meant to accelerate real-time 3-D graphics (OpenGL compliant) applications. The goal of the framework is a low-cost, low-power, high-performance design that delivers good image quality. We focus on several key problem areas in tile-based rasterization, such as: rasterization and triangle traversal, antialiasing, and geometrical primitive list sorting. We present an original triangle traversal hardware algorithm implementation, composed of a systolic primitive scan-conversion subsystem and a logic-enhanced memory subsystem, able to deliver 4 pixel positions per clock cycle in a very advantageous spatial pattern, exploited to reduce the power consumption and increase the throughput, to the pixel processing pipelines for rasterization. Area-sampling antialiasing is achieved with a pixel-coverage mask generation algorithm that reduces the mask storage costs by exploiting the quadrant symmetry property when deriving on the fly, via computationally inexpensive operations, the required coverage masks. The costs are reduced by an order of magnitude and the image quality, i.e., coverage mask accuracy, almost doubles when compared to prior state-of-the-art implementations. At the front end of the rasterization process, as the host processor needs to be able to process different other system tasks in a system-on-chip embedded architecture, we propose a novel and efficient hardware primitive list sorting algorithm that lowers on the one hand the effort of the host processor required to generate the primitive tiling lists and reduces on the other hand the external memory traffic. For an implementation footprint similar to an 8KB SRAM memory macro, the number of the instructions on the host processor for tiling list generation was lowered by 4–9x and the memory cost by 3–6x, for our embedded benchmark suite GraalBench, when compared to the software driver implementation alone. Our estimations indicate that the GRAAL design, clocked at a frequency of 200MHz, can sustain a rendering and fill rate of 2.4 million triangles/s and 460 million pixels/s for typical 3-D graphics scenes.Computer EngineeringElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effect of Immigration on Wages
Get PDFIn our increasingly interconnected and open world, international migration is becoming an important socio-economic phenomenon for many countries. Since the early 1980s, many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets. Borjas (2003) noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study. In addition, these effects cluster around zero. Such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome, given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages.
We revisit this issue by applying meta-analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers, which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers. While many studies in our database employ US data, estimates are also obtained from Germany, The Netherlands, France, Norway, Austria, Israel and Australia. Our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach. Technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well
Development of a Teaching Exercise for the Design of a Revetment
No full textObjectives of this work are to: a. Identify a problem related with coastal defence. b. Understand how to determine the boundary conditions and apply this knowledge. c. Understand the choice ofthe solution. d. Understand how to design a simple revetment with rip-rap as one of the coastal defences. e. To develop educational material to be used at university level in Indonesia.KWP-collectio
The Spatial Economy in the Urban Informal Settlement
No full textIn the rapidly urbanizing world, the informal settlement has been forming a significant part of the common urban scene in many cities in the developing countries. It holds a particular role in the city as it houses millions of urban poor who has no access to the public housing. However it does not only offer accommodation but also economic opportunities that enables the inhabitants to survive. The informal settlement displays a very specific and particular mechanism of survival that is significantly characterized by the notion of flexibility in term of production and spatial occupation. This research aims to investigate the local spatial economy or the spatial dynamic of survivability in the informal settlement. It focuses on the notion of space and locations of the process of survival in such settlement by analyzing the way the spaces are organized and negotiated as one of the most important tool of production and the place of production. It analyzes the dynamics by relating it to the notions of the social capital and the life chances in the informal settlement. Moreover in order to offer a deeper understanding of the problem, apart from the looking at the actual and the localized problem, it will also look at the root of the problems by relating it to its past as an element of a colonial city; and analyse the major economic forces that contribute to its creation by relating it with the Dual City theory in order to accentuate the nature of the problem and its position in the metropolitan context. The research employs the case of kampong to illustrate the case of the informal settlement in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. The result of the research shows that the dynamic of the survivability in the informal settlement is characterized by a multi-tier relationship between the formal and the informal economy. The continuity of its production is related to the wider economic sector; namely the formal sector, that creates demands and economic opportunities for them. It is also strongly bounded with its actual location; dislocation would therefore destroy the local livelihood. The local economic activities are also determined by the flexibility of the local spatial organization and production. These particular characters enable the inhabitants to manoeuvre in order to survive amidst the limited capital and resource. The process of production is highly depended on the intensity social relation that makes the spatial negotiation and the flexible production possible to take place. The local survivability therefore is in the same time very flexible and fragile.Architectur
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