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In the last 20 years wage inequality in the United States has grown significantly. At the same time, the increased popularity of employee involvement or the so-called high-performance work practices seems to offer opportunities for more skilled, autonomous, and participatory work. For many, this is a positive alternative to low-wage jobs, though others suggest that such jobs may raise skill requirements sufficiently to leave many workers behind and thereby contribute to growing inequality. Yet others are more critical and view participatory work systems as merely a method of work intensification. This paper examines the impact of participative work systems on workers’ wages and generally finds modest evidence of significant effects.

Composite slabs are gaining wide acceptance in many countries as they lend themselves to faster, lighter and more economic in construction buildings. The strength of composite slabs system relies on the bonding action between the concrete and the steel deck, the shear connections and the cross-sectional resistance of steel beam. However, structural behaviour of composite slab is a complex phenomenon and therefore experimental study is often conducted to establish the actual strength of the structure under ultimate load capacity. The main objective of this study is to determine the structural behaviour of composite slab system until ultimate limit state. Total of two specimens are examined in order to obtain failure mechanism of the composite structure under full load capacity. A new design approach of composite slab for roofing system are proposed in this study to construct a composite slab system that can float in the water but not wash away by flood. The lightweight materials in this composite construction are cold-formed steel and foam concrete. The system focuses on the concept of Industrialised building system (IBS) to reduce the cost and construction time.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) creates rights for covered employees, defines conduct that violates those rights, and deems that conduct an unfair labor practice. But while given broad remedial powers under the Act, the Board's options were curtailed by the Supreme Court's limit on the use of deterrence as an express remedial justification. The Board was left with a strongly make-whole, i.e., ex-post, focus to undo the consequences of a violation.

Put differently, the current NLRA remedies reflect a pay-or-play philosophy. The goal is restoration after the fact, using ex-post remedies to give parties the benefit or status quo that they expected. An actor willing to pay may use a cost–benefit analysis and strategically choose to violate the Act, accepting the make-whole remedies later. But the Act created ex-ante statutory rights, not agreed-upon contractual terms. By statutory enactment, employees are given something of value deemed worthy of protection. Assigning value to compliance with the law in the first instance not only prevents sometimes irreparable harm but also reaffirms the inherent value of the right itself.

The impact of the Board's limited remedies is therefore a broad value-driven one. Without ex-ante deterrence, the available ex-post make-whole remedial options make a normative statement about individuals' rights under the Act: those rights may not be inherently worth enough to incentivize legal compliance. The make-whole focus can imply that financial compensation for the portion of harm that can be calculated and “undoing” some nonfinancial effects is sufficient. There is little drive to deter infringement before the fact. By examining the remedial philosophy behind contrasting approaches in the common law of torts and contract, this Article asserts that the current remedial strictures and framework undermine both the Act and the worth of its rights in the eyes of the public and the employees who hold them.

This chapter argues that the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud provide a useful methodology for the study of government secrecy. The chapter makes two specific points. First, Freud viewed the human mind as a highly complex censoring device, which systematically censors certain types of information that embarrasses the patient, while it makes available without impediment more innocuous types of information that flatter the patient's image. It is argued that governmental bureaucracies work like this too, as they systematically censor information that is embarrassing to the state and state officials, while they make available information that flatters the state. Secondly, Freud's theories provide insight into how researchers can cut through systematic censorship and gain access to hidden information. Specifically, Freud shows that patients periodically slip and release censored information to the psychoanalyst. Similarly, state officials too will slip and will accidentally release information to historical researchers who study public policies.

Earthworks are the embankments and cuttings that allow a railway to maintain a certain line, level and grade through the landscape. Earth embankments consist of an engineered bank of earth that carries the railway above the natural ground. A cutting is used to carry the railway through ground with a natural level above the line of the railway. Modern (post 1960s) earthworks are carefully engineered to perform well. However, many railways run on earthworks that were constructed over 100 years ago without the use of mechanised plant. The quality of construction of older earthworks was often poor compared with present-day engineering practice. Ageing of the earthwork structures, and the greater demands of heavier and faster trains and climatic change, means that earthworks suffer ultimate and serviceability failures that can present operational difficulties. Older earthworks that fail or do not perform well require maintenance and repair, and sometimes complete replacement. This chapter explores the main engineering considerations for modern earthworks, and the challenges associated with older earthworks including their modes of failure and upgrade and repair.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) can have a powerful impact on school-aged children. Yet this impact may not be realized if classroom teachers do not use empirically supported interventions and/or fail to include the best research available when they make important educational decisions about children. Whether classroom teachers use EBP may be influenced, in part, by what they learned or failed to learn in their preservice preparation programs. This chapter describes recent efforts to assess preservice teachers’ understanding and use of empirically supported interventions and provides four examples of how such practices were taught to preservice general educators in a small, regional teacher preparation program. We discuss four contemporary educational reform movements (i.e., federal policies mandating EBP, state-level policies linking growth in pupil learning to teacher evaluation, clinically rich teacher preparation, and the emergence of a practice-based evidence approach) that should increase interest and use of EBP in teacher education and offer recommendations for how teacher educators might infuse EBP into their traditional teaching, research, and service functions in higher education.

The chapter contains a methodology for formalized evaluation of the role of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia) in ensuring monetary and financial sustainability with the help of the monetary policy transmission mechanism and its inflation target regime. The significance of the research of the Bank of Russia operations to ensure financial sustainability is due to a number of circumstances: the uniqueness of the Bank of Russia that appeared only 27 years ago and experienced several devastating events related to the 1998 financial crisis, the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and the stagnation of the Russian economy in 2014–2016, as well as high volatility of world prices for Russian commodity exports and the latest contra-Russian sanctions that significantly affected the volatility of the Russian ruble. Taking into account all the above, the issue of the Bank of Russia’s effective activities in the long run is aggravated by the fact that there are still more open questions than proven relationships of causes and effects regarding the potential of specific monetary policy instruments in the context of low-growth and high-volatility environment. The modeling of the Bank of Russia strategic and operational targets has been based on the parameters’ dependencies presented by the money (credit) multiplier in the interpretation of G. Schinasi (2006) and on the instability of stable economy hypothesis of H. Minsky (2008). As a result, there have been established the marginal levels of definite indicators of the banking system performance that could allow the Bank of Russia to ensure financial sustainability in the low-growth and high-volatility environment.

We investigated the effect of religion on generosity, interpersonal trust, and cooperation by using games developed by experimental economists (Dictator, Trust, and Public Goods). In these experiments, individuals were paired or grouped with unknown strangers to test the degree to which religion promotes prosocial behavior. We evaluated group- and individual-level effects of religion on prosocial behavior across the three games. Although playing the games in a religious setting showed no overall difference as compared to a secular setting, we did find a weak association between some individual-level dimensions of religiosity and behavior in some of the games. The weak association between religion and behavior is consistent with theory and empirical studies using similar measures – the anonymous pairing and grouping of the economic games may moderate individual-level effects of religion. Our research is a strong complement to the empirical literature because the three studies involved a large and diverse sample and used sensitive instruments that have been found to reliably measure prosocial behavior.