The aim of the thesis is to further explore the relationship between economic integration and firm mobility and investment, both from an empirical and a theoretical perspective, with the objective of drawing conclusions on how government policy can be used to strengthen the positive impact of integration on investment, which is crucial in moving and maintaining countries at the forefront of the technology frontier and accelerating economic growth in a world of rapid technical change and high mobility of ideas, goods, services, capital and labor. The first chapter aims to bring together the literature on economic integration, firm mobility and investment. It contains two sections: one dedicated to the literature on FDI and the second covering the literature on firm entry and exit, economic performance and economic and business regulation. In the second chapter I examine the relationship between the Single Market and FDI both in an intra-EU context and from outside the EU. The empirical results show that the impact of the Single Market on FDI differs substantially from one country to another. This finding may be due to the functioning of institutions. The third chapter studies the relationship between the level of external trade protection put into place by a Regional Integration Agreement(RIA)and the option of a firm from outside the RIA block to serve the RIA market through FDI rather than exports. I find that the level of external trade protection put in place by the RIA depends on the RIA country's capacity to benefit from FDI spillovers, the magnitude of set-up costs of building a plant in the RIA and on the amount of external trade protection erected by the country from outside the reigonal block with respect to the RIA. The fourth chapter studies how the firm entry and exit process is affected by product market reforms and regulations and impact macroeconomic performance. The results show that an increase in deregulation will lead to a rise in firm entry and exit. This in turn will especially affect macroeconomic performance as measured by output growth and labor productivity growth. The analysis done at the sector level shows that results can differ substantially across industries, which implies that deregulation policies should be conducted at the sector level, rather than at the global macroeconomic level.

The occurrence of large scale and rapid climate shifts at millennial time-scales (suborbital) remains an enigma between records from high and low latitudes spanning the Late Quaternary. This thesis studies such variations in the eastern tropical North Pacific (ETNP) using marine sediment cores retrieved from Mexico and Nicaragua. The main goals are to understand the nature of millennial timescale climate-changes in the Pacific low latitudes, to identify the atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections involved, to document the impacts on the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and silicon, and their potential to regulate Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations during the last two glacial cycles (the last 240,000 years before present). In this thesis, we use a suite of multi-proxy records from the Core MD02-2519, which are compared to others records from adjoining regions to study the climatic history of the ETNP at millennial timescales. The Core MD02-2519, was retrieved from 955 mbsl off NW Mexico. It is strategically located within the North Pacific Intermediate Water (NPIW), underlying the coastal upwelling and denitrification zones of the ETNP. The paleoceanography of the region is studied using proxy records of productivity, denitrification, intermediate water circulation and radiocarbon activity, which are discussed in 5 separated chapters. In Chapter 1, we use records of organic carbon (%OC) and diffuse spectral reflectivity (DSRa*) to document changes in productivity, which are shown in phase with Northern Hemisphere (NH) timing at millennial scale, suggesting a direct atmospheric teleconnection with higher northern latitudes. In Chapter 2, reconstruction of nitrogen isotope records (δ15N) show that abrupt changes in denitrification are in phase with NH timing over the last glacial period; however, the advection of heavy nitrate from southern sources is also documented, possibly from the denitrification zone off Peru-Chile. Records of opal (%opal – Chapter 3) and carbon isotopes from benthic foraminifera (δ13C-Uvigerina – Chapter 4) support the inference of oceanic teleconnections between the ETNP and the South Pacific via subthermocline circulation. In Chapter 4, the δ13C records also suggest that intermediate water circulation changed over glacial periods and terminations, being the result of intrusion of southern component waters. In Chapter 5, the reconstruction of radiocarbon activity (Δ14C) records from surface (planktonic foraminifera) and intermediate water (benthic foraminifera) suggest oceanic degassing of old-carbon from the deep ocean during the last termination. In this way, the ETNP upwelling system could be an important locus of CO2 release at millennial timescales.

In Mexico, corn (Zea mays L.) is the most important crop (59% of its agriculture land) and the primary source of sediment yield. This study looks for alternatives to maintain corn productivity by means of sustainable soil and water conservation practices at central Mexico. In order to understand broad tendencies between soil erosion and crop productivity in the region, the EPIC (Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator) model was applied in the Texcoco's district as follows:1) Calibrate the model using 352 experimental corn plots established between 1972 and 1992 in 36 rural communities.2) Validate the model on a spatial basis, using GIS tools, by means of historic corn yields.3) Identify the most vulnerable areas where corn productivity is being affected by soil erosion.4) Analyze the relationship between soil erosion and crop productivity, over a 100 years of simulation, comparing the Current Management (CM) and the Recommended Management (RM) by governmental institutions.5) Evaluate the most feasible soil and water conservation practices for the region.From the calibration process, it was concluded that the EPIC model, under a wide range of environmental conditions, simulates very good corn yield (r2 between 0.88 and 0.90), annual runoff (r2=0.98), and annual sediment production (r2=0.96).Base on the official environmental inputs available in the region, the EPIC model can assess only a moderately strong relationship (r2=0.58) between the official historical crop records and the simulated ones.Comparison between CM and RM shows that the average crop yield in the region can be increased by 32.6% if RM were followed. Under the CM, the loss of soil fertility in the district reduces corn productivity by 3% over a hundred years. At least 50.0% of the region's agricultural area needs soil conservation practices, mainly on areas with slopes over 5%. If it is decided to grow corn under conventional till in such areas it is recommended to construct bench terraces in order to maintain soil erosion below 20 t/ha/yr. Corn under no till, besides control erosion, can also increase grain productivity by at least 40% (0.6 t/ha) by combining contouring, mulching, and manures.

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Information is an important part of the manual assembly process. Information provides the user with the means to fulfil assembly tasks so that the right quality as well as high productivity are accomplished. This thesis addresses issues connected to information and information use in a modern manual assembly environment, and how these issues affect human operators, quality and productivity. The overall objectives of the research were to gain further knowledge on how attention affects the internal reject rate, to investigate these phenomena in industrial and laboratory environments and finally to propose a suitable evaluation method to be utilised at the design stage of an information system. Studies were performed with the purpose of investigating how the assembly personnel were affected by the information and how it affected quality and productivity. The studies were performed in an assembly plant and in the laboratory. Quantitative data collection included 10 days and nights of production where the information impact on quality was investigated. Connected to this study was a qualitative survey performed among 171 persons from the assembly personnel. The laboratory study took place during three days, approximately eight hours each day. It involved 30 persons, all experienced assembly workers from the reference assembly plant. The focus of this study was how information affected the personnel and thereby the productivity. The findings revealed that information affected the quality rates and productivity and that this can be linked to how the information is presented as well as when the information is presented. It was possible to link these findings to the outcome of a successful information search process, and to conclude that a use of an evaluation method or work process during the product lifecycle could have made it possible to avoid some of the problems connected to the information presentation. This is the basis for a proposed pragmatic evaluation method. The method was tested as a support system during the design of a prototype user interface to be used at the pilot plant. The major contribution of this research is the connection between attention and quality as well as the connection between attention and productivity. Knowledge regarding the importance of presenting the information at the right time must also be regarded as an important and proven contribution.

This study examined the effects of a productivity-indexed pay for performance plan in a professional services firm. The new plan was implemented after productivity decreased under an existing plan. Performance of staff and senior level accountants was analyzed across three departments under a three-year baseline and a two-year intervention period. Several measures of productivity indicated that the intervention was effective in improving production, especially for employees with full annual workloads. Percentage of salaries earned in incentives was comparable for both the baseline and intervention periods. Possible explanations for trends in the data, weaknesses in the plan, and implications for future research are also discussed.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The advantages of using visual programming to create, modify, test and display a telemetry stream are presented. The failure to fully deploy the high-gain antenna of the Galileo spacecraft has resulted in a software redesign of the computer systems onboard the spacecraft to support the low-gain antenna mission. Visual programming software is being used to test new algorithms as part of the ground support for the spacecraft Test Bed. It is very important that any new software algorithms be thoroughly tested on the ground before any modifications are made to the spacecraft. The advantage of using a visual programming language (LabVIEW, National Instruments) is that it provides easy visibility into the decommutation process that is being modified by the Galileo programming support team. In addition, utilities were written using visual programming to allow real-time data display and error detection. A data acquisition board is used to clock in the actual synchronous telemetry signal from the Test Bed at rates below 10 kHz. The time to write and modify the code using visual programming is significantly less (by a factor of 4 to 10) than using text-based code. The gains in productivity are attributed to the communication among the customer, developer, and computer that are facilitated by the visual syntax of the language.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate various factors that influence the job performance and promotion of DOD civilian workers. The data used in this study were drawn from the Department of Defense Civilian Personnel Data Files provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC). The initial data was restricted to employees who were initially hired in 1995 and stayed in service until 2003 and were paid under the General Schedule (GS) pay system. Three general performance measures were used: compensation (salary), annual performance ratings and promotions. Multivariate models were specified and estimated for each of these performance measures. The results indicate that females receive lower annual and hourly compensation and are less likely to be promoted than men even though they receive better performance ratings. The results also indicate that minorities are paid less and are less likely to be promoted than majority workers while veterans are paid more, perform better, and are more likely to become supervisors. The models also reveal that performance rating is a weak measure of productivity and that more highly educated employees are paid more and more likely to be promoted more even if they are not always the best performers.

Assessing the conditions of productivity of individual workers who process information and use IT has been a concern for many researchers. Prior studies have applied different theoretical foundations to study the relationship between IT use and productivity at individual level in post adoption scenarios and have provided mixed results. In the last decades, the proposition that there is a need for a set of factors to be changed in a synchronized fashion when using an IT system has received particular attention. Very little, however, is known about the configurations of these factors at individual level. To investigate this gap, we have designed a new research model of an information worker’s individual productivity when a more aligned IT system is used in a synchronized manner with both individual and organizational factors. The formulated research model is grounded on the complementarity theory, functioning here as a meta-theory guiding the linking of productivity theory, Kirton’s adaption-innovation theory, and several theoretical bodies on the structure of production processes and human resource management. The formulated model was tested in two empirical studies – a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and an online experiment – conducted to investigate configurations of complementary factors that increase productivity when a new, more aligned IT system is used. Overall, the two studies shed important light on configurations of complementary factors and the improvement of the research design to study their impact on IT-enabled productivity. The obtained results contribute to the research that focuses on individual information worker IT-enabled productivity as well as research that rests on the complementarity theory with new configurations of complementary factors that, when matched correctly, can increase individual productivity of information workers. Eventually, the studies presented here advocate that further research is needed to increase our in-depth understanding of complementary factors and their impact on individual IT-enabled productivity of information workers.