Employment | EPFL Graph Search

Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any other entity, pays the other, the employee, in return for carrying out assigned work. Employees work in return for wages, which can be paid on the basis of an hourly rate, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does, the prevailing conditions of the sector and the bargaining power between the parties. Employees in some sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits may include health insurance, housing, disability insurance. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, organisation or legal contracts. Employees and employers An employee contributes labour and expertis

Accessibility Futures

Paul Richard Anderson

This study uses accessibility as a performance measure to evaluate a matrix of future land use and network scenarios for planning purposes. The concept of accessibility dates to the 1950s, but this type of application to transportation planning is new. Previous research has established the coevolution of transportation and land use, demonstrated the dependence of accessibility on both, and made the case for the use of accessibility measures as a planning tool. This study builds off of these findings by demonstrating the use of accessibility-based performance measures in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. This choice of performance measure also allows for transit and highway networks to be compared side-by-side. For roadway modeling, zone-to-zone travel time matrix was computed using stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) assignment with travel time feedback to trip distribution. A database of schedules was used on the transit networks to assign transit routes. This travel time data was joined with the land use data from each scenario to obtain the employment, population, and labor accessibility from each traffic analysis zone (TAZ) within specified time ranges. Tables of person-weighted accessibility were computed for 20 minutes with zone population as the weight for employment accessibility and zone employment as the weight for population and labor accessibility. Maps of accessibility by zone were produced to show the spatial distribution of accessibility across the region. The results show that a scenario where population and employment growth are concentrated in the center of the metropolitan area would produce the highest accessibility no matter which transportation network changes are made. However, another scenario which concentrates population growth in the center of the metropolitan area and shifts employment growth to the periphery consistently outperforms the scenario representing the projected 2030 land use without any growth management strategy.

Wiley-Blackwell2013

Essays in Financial Economics

Christoph Helmut Peter Herpfer

This thesis contains four chapters, each of which utilizes new or unusual data sources to analyze a different area of financial economics. In the first chapter, I construct a novel dataset linking individual bankers to large borrowers in the U.S. syndicated loan market to analyze the impact of bankers on bank lending. I find that time invariant banker fixed effects have at least as much explanatory power as bank fixed effects across key loan outcome variables. One channel through which bankers impact lending is through personal relationships with borrowers. I address the endogenous nature of relationship formation by exploiting shocks to relationships from the departure of bankers and find that stronger personal relationships are associated with significantly lower interest rates charged to clients. Reduced interest rates of relationship loans reflect superior information of bankers, rather than nepotism. Loans issued by bankers that have stronger personal relationships with borrowers are associated with fewer bankruptcies and no more beneficial terms upon renegotiation. The second chapter, which is joint work with Stefano Colonnello, exploits a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on diversity of citizenship in legal disputes to estimate the contribution of the court system to firm value. In an event study, we find that an increase in state court quality from bottom to top tercile is associated with an average increase in equity value of 0.45%, or about $8.7 million on the event day. This effect appears to be driven by courts¿ attitude towards businesses more than by their competency and is more pronounced for firms in industries with high litigation risk. We also test whether firms benefit from the ability to steer lawsuits into friendly courts, so called forum shopping. We provide evidence that a reduction in firms¿ ability to forum shop decreases firm value, whereas a reduction in plaintiffs¿ ability to forum shop increases firm value. We further document that the ruling had significant real effects. Firms which previously stayed out of regions with potentially problematic courts subsequently increased their operations in those regions. The third chapter is coauthored with Matthias Effing, Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, and Philipp Krüger and examines the impact of a sudden home currency appreciation on the valuation and behavior of corporations in a developed economy. The Swiss National Bank surprisingly repealed the minimum exchange rate of 1.2 Swiss francs per Euro on January 15, 2015. On that day the franc appreciated by 15% and the main stock market index dropped by 8.7%. The impact was largest for export oriented firms with high domestic costs. These firms experienced 5% lower announcement returns, subsequently faced economically sizeable reductions in sales and profitability, and responded by reducing investment by 8.1% while only slightly reducing employment. In the fourth chapter, which is joint work with Cornelius Schmidt and Aksel Mjøs, we exploit exogenous shocks to the distance between corporate borrowers and banks to analyze the role of distance in commercial bank lending. We find that a reduction in travel time due to improved infrastructure increases the likelihood of initiating a new borrowing relationship, evidence that closer distance creates a surplus from lower transaction costs. In existing lending relationships, however, banks capture a fraction of this surplus by increasing interest rates.

EPFL2017

Hire fast, fire slow: the employment benefits of energy transitions

Yann Füllemann, Vincent Moreau, Marc Vielle, François Richard Vuille

The transition towards decarbonized and efficient energy systems has broad socio-economic implications. We estimate the potential impacts on employment from efforts in energy efficiency in industry, transport and buildings as well as substituting local renewable energy sources for fossil fuels. Both energy supply and demand are accounted for. We use a hybrid approach that combines national energy transition scenarios with input–output tables, adjusted for new energy and non-energy activities. We conclude that the transition has a net positive impact on employment as illustrated by the case of Switzerland. The local and decentralized nature of energy efficiency and renewables retains a greater share of value-added domestically than does a supply chain of fossil fuels. Moreover, we find that more jobs are created in demand-side activities, such as building renovation, than in renewable energy generation. Positive impacts on jobs from spillover effects in all non-energy activities are also found.