Establishment Closures in Germany: The Motherhood Penalty at Job Search Durations

This study contributes to the research on motherhood penalties by investigating based on German longitudinal register data whether mothers take longer to search for a job than childless women. We develop a unique research design to test the theory of statistical discrimination as well as the theory of status-based discrimination. We use establishment closures as a starting point that creates equal conditions for all previously employed women. Following a subsequent coarsened exact matching approach, we investigate the job search length of almost 3,000 comparable full-time working childless women and mothers from almost 700 establishments by applying event history techniques. Even after extensive robustness checks that back up the main findings, we can show that mothers have lower transition rates to re-employment than childless women. When including additional information, such as higher age of the youngest child or shorter parental leave durations, both of which serve as indicators of higher labour market attachment, we find reduced differences and buffering effects on the motherhood penalty.

A Linear Threshold Model for Optimal Stopping Behavior

In many real life decisions, options are distributed in space and time, making itnecessary to sequentially search through them, often without a chance to return to arejected option. The optimal strategy in these tasks is to choose the first option that isabove a threshold that depends on the current position in the sequence. The implicitdecision making strategies by humans vary but largely diverge from this optimalstrategy; the reasons for this divergence remain unknown. We present a new model ofhuman stopping decisions in sequential decision making tasks based on a linearthreshold heuristic. We show that the new model outperforms existing models forsequential decision making. Moreover, it accurately predicts participants’ search length,and how they adapt it to different environments. It thus provides an important steptowards understanding human sequential decision making.

A NoSQL Framework Based on the DHT

In light of the current development of NoSQL(Non-relational database) and DHT [1] (Distributed Hash Table )is features, this article first proposes the adoption of B + tree as a DHT data structure, which can reduce the path length when the users find the corresponding node address, make the search length maintain the tree height and support the search of the data range. This article secondly advices to use the control node to manage and monitor DHT data distribution of NoSQL, reducing the burden of DHT routing and improving the efficiency of data search. Experimental results show that such a framework can greatly improve the routing efficiency and speed up the user access speed.

DOUBLE HASHING WITH MULTIPLE PASSBITS

We present a novel extension to passbits providing significant reduction to unsuccessful search lengths for open addressing collision resolution hashing. Both the experimental and analytical results presented demonstrate the dramatic reductions possible. This method does not restrict the hashing table configuration parameters and utilizes very little additional storage space per bucket. The runtime performance for insertion is essentially the same as for ordinary open addressing with passbits; the successful search lengths remain the same as for open addressing without passbits. For any given loading factor, the unsuccessful search length can be made to be arbitrarily close to one bucket access.