Dissertationen zum Thema „Absence“

The purpose of this thesis has been to analyse seven major factors that tend to influence the rate of early retirement in Sweden. The scope of data was gathered for every municipality in Sweden. Economic theories of labour supply, Moral Hazard, Adverse Selection and the Insurance Model were used to analyse the empirical results. In the analysis, earlier studies of the rate of sickness absence were important and used as a framework in choosing the explanatory variables for the econometric model. The analysed variables were; average income, average sickness days, educational level, foreign born, public sector employment, unemployment and the share of women in the population. As a consequence of the rift that occurred in 2003, when the average sickness days decreased and disbursed early retirements simultaneously increased, the relationship between these two variables was given special attention. The empirical findings confirmed our conjectures and were consistent with earlier research. Average income and the level of education were negatively related to the rate of early retirement. Moreover foreign born, average sickness days and unemployment showed a positive relation to early retirement. The relationship between average sickness days and early retirement had statistically changed and decreased between the years. A possibility is that other factors, such as changed social norms and increased stress in society (which are difficult to measure in a statistical and economical sense) might have become more relevant in explaining the rate of early retirement.

Syftet med denna uppsats har varit att analysera sju viktiga faktorer som tenderar att påverka graden av förtidspensionering i Sverige. Data omfånget insamlades för alla kommuner i Sverige. Ekonomiska teorier om arbetsutbud, Moral Hazard, Adverse Selection och Insurance Model användes för att analysera de empiriska resultaten. I analysen var tidigare studier utav graden av sjukfrånvaro viktig och användes som ramverk i valet av de förklarande variablerna till den ekonometriska modellen. De analyserade variablerna var; medelinkomst, genom-snittliga sjukdagar, utbildningsnivå, utlandsfödda, offentligt anställda, arbetslöshet och andelen kvinnor i befolkningen. Som en konsekvens utav den klyfta som uppstod 2003, när de genomsnittliga sjukdagarna minskade och utbetalda förtidspensioner samtidigt ökade, gavs sambandet mellan dessa två variabler speciell uppmärksamhet. De empiriska iakttagelserna bekräftade våra förväntningar och stämde överens med tidigare forskning. Medelinkomst och utbildningsnivå var negativt relaterade till graden av förtidspensionering. Dessutom var utlandsfödd, genomsnittliga sjukdagar och arbetslöshet positivt relaterade till förtidspensionering. Relationen mellan de genomsnittliga sjukdagarna och graden av förtidspensionering hade statistiskt sätt ändrats genom att ha minskat mellan åren. En tänkbar förklaring till detta skulle kunna vara att andra faktorer, såsom skiftande sociala normer och en ökande stress i samhället (vilka är svåra att mäta statistiskt och ekonomiskt) kan ha blivit mer relevanta i att förklara graden av förtidspensionering.

Absenteeism was explored from a social psychological perspective. The purpose was to measure the absence cultures (Nicholson and Johns, l9S5) of male and female employees through the use of policy capturing (Hobson and Gibson, l9S3). Absence was split into three dimensions: Personal Health, Stress Relief, and Family Responsibility (Nicholson and Payne, l9S7). One hundred and two employees of a large southeastern university were used as subjects. They were asked to give their own opinion and their opinion of their organization's view about the inappropriateness/appropriateness of the absence behaviors in the 27 policy capturing vignettes. They were also asked to give their subjective weighting of how they used each dimension to make their overall rating.

This thesis attempts to investigate if national culture still is a factor to consider for large multinational organizations when choosing a supplier, or if the global business environment due to globalization has become so standardized and homogenous that the influence of national culture differences has diminished. Existing academic literature is divided regarding this matter; some studies indicate that the influence of national culture on business relations is subtle while other argues that national culture differences may be a source for potential barriers and problems and therefore still an important factor to consider. The issue of globalization has also divided researchers, some argue that globalization has made it possible for a homogenous business culture to emerge while other argue that globalization is a myth and ‘global companies’ are in reality regional. Empirical information was collected through interviews at head offices from four large Swedish multinational companies and questions were asked to determine the importance of national culture when choosing a supplier, the influence national culture has on organizational culture and to what extent a homogenous business culture has emerged. The study’s findings identified little evidence to support the idea that cultural difference is a significant factor to consider when conducting business relations. None or very little consideration to national cultural differences was paid when choosing a supplier. However, consideration was sometimes taken to organizational culture, which findings indicate is partly influenced by national culture. The interviewed organizations were of the opinion that at high management level a ‘global culture’ has emerged, and therefore the ‘way of doing business’ has become more uniform. The conclusion, which turned into more of a tendency indication, made from this thesis were that although national cultural differences still exist and probably will do so for some time, the influence it has on ‘business-to-business’ relations between multinational organizations at high management levels has diminished due to the emergence of a more homogenous global business culture.

The complex behavior of computer systems offers many challenges for formal verification. The analysis quickly becomes difficult as the number of participating processes increases.

A parameterized system is a family of systems parameterized on a number n, typically representing the number of participating processes. The uniform verification problem — to check whether a property holds for each instance — is an infinite-state problem. The automated analysis of parameterized and infinite-state systems has been the subject of research over the last 15–20 years. Much of the work has focused on safety properties. Progress in verification of liveness properties has been slow, as it is more difficult in general.

In this thesis, we consider verification of parameterized and infinite-state systems, with an emphasis on liveness, in the verification framework called regular model checking (RMC). In RMC, states are represented as words, sets of states as regular expressions, and the transition relation as a regular relation.

We extend the automata-theoretic approach to RMC. We define a specification logic sufficiently strong to specify systems representable using RMC, and linear temporal logic properties of such systems, and provide an automatic translation from a specification into an analyzable model.

We develop acceleration techniques for RMC which allow more uniform and automatic verification than before, with greater power. Using these techniques, we succeed to verify safety and liveness properties of parameterized protocols from the literature.

We present a novel reachability based verification method for verification of liveness, in a general setting. We implement the method for RMC, with promising results.

Finally, we develop a framework for the verification of dynamic networks based on graph transformation, which generalizes the systems representable in RMC. In this framework we verify the latest version of the DYMO routing protocol, currently being considered for standardization by the IETF.