This thesis deals with economic aspects of employees' sickness. In addition to the classical case of sickness absence, in which an employee is completely unable to work and hence stays at home, there is the case of sickness presenteeism, in which the employee comes to work despite being sick. Accordingly, the thesis at hand covers research on both sickness states, absence and presenteeism. The first section covers sickness absence and labour market institutions. Chapter 2 presents theoretical and empirical evidence that differences in the social norm against benefit fraud, so-called benefit morale, can explain cross country diversity in the generosity of statutory sick pay entitlements between developed countries. In our political economy model, a stricter benefit morale reduces the absence rate, with counteracting effects on the politically set sick pay replacement rate. On the one hand, less absence caused by a stricter norm, makes the tax-financed insurance cheaper, leading to the usual demand side effect and hence to more generous sick pay entitlements. On the other hand, being less likely to be absent due to a stricter norm, the voters prefer a smaller fee over more insurance. We document both effects in a sample of 31 developed countries, capturing the years from 1981 to 2010. In Chapter 3 we investigate the relationship between the existence of works councils and illness-related absence and its consequences for plants. Using individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find that the existence of a works council is positively correlated with the incidence and the annual duration of absence. Additionally, linked employer-employee data (LIAB) suggests that employers are more likely to expect personnel problems due to absence in plants with a works council. In western Germany, we find significant effects using a difference-in-differences approach, which can be causally interpreted. The second part of this thesis covers two studies on sickness presenteeism. In Chapter 4, we empirically investigate the determinants of the annual duration of sickness presenteeism using the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). Work autonomy, workload and tenure are positively related to the number of sickness presenteeism days, while a good working environment comes with less presenteeism. In Chapter 5 we theoretically and empirically analyze sickness absence and presenteeism behaviour with a focus on their interdependence. Specifically, we ask whether work-related factors lead to a substitutive, a complementary or no relationship between sickness absence and presenteeism. In other words, we want to know whether changes in absence and presenteeism behaviour incurred by work-related characteristics point in opposite directions (substitutive), the same direction (complementary), or whether they only affect either one of the two sickness states (no relationship). Our theoretical model shows that the relationship between sickness absence and presenteeism with regard to work-related characteristics is not necessarily of a substitutive nature. Instead, a complementary or no relationship can emerge as well. Turning to the empirical investigation, we find that only one out of 16 work-related factors, namely the supervisor status, leads to a substitutive relationship between absence and presenteeism. Few of the other determinants are complements, while the large majority is either related to sickness absence or presenteeism.

Major threats to the Spanish Constitutional Court’s independence and authority have come, first, from political parties and the media and, second, by the Catalonian secession movement. The authority and the legitimacy of the Constitutional Court were tested in the stormy proceedings on the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 2006 that ended in 2010 and, above all, in the period of 2013–2017, when successive acts directed at the secession of were recurrently Catalonia challenged before the Court and subsequently overturned, and to stop the continued disobedience its rulings the of Court was given extended execution powers for its judgments. These new powers include the temporary replacement of any authority or public official that does not comply with a Court’s ruling and the ordering of a substitutive execution through the central government. The Court declared the new powers to be consistent with the Constitution (with three dissenting votes by four constitutional judges) and it even used them for the first time to enforce its prohibition of the referendum on the independence of Catalonia of 1 October 2017. Nevertheless, the Venice Commission has raised doubts about the opportunity of those powers, which are unusual in European constitutional jurisdiction models. At the end, the Court’s powers were not enough to stop the Catalonian secession process, and on 27 October 2017 the state government implemented the federal coercion clause and suspended Catalonian autonomy until new elections were held.

One of the most essential hypotheses of usage-based theories and many constructionist approaches to language is that language entails the piecemeal learning of constructions on the basis of general cognitive mechanisms and exposure to the target language in use (Ellis 2002; Tomasello 2003). However, there is still a considerable lack of empirical research on the emergence and mental representation of constructions in second language (L2) acquisition. One crucial question that arises, for instance, is whether L2 learners’ knowledge of a construction corresponds to a native-like mapping of form and meaning and, if so, to what extent this representation is shaped by usage. For instance, it is unclear how learners ‘build’ constructional knowledge, i.e. which pieces of frequency-, form- and meaning-related information become relevant for the entrenchment and schematisation of a L2 construction. To address these issues, the English catenative verb construction was used as a testbed phenomenon. This idiosyncratic complex construction is comprised of a catenative verb and a non-finite complement clause (see Huddleston & Pullum 2002), which is prototypically a gerund-participial (henceforth referred to as ‘target-ing’ construction) or a to-infinitival complement (‘target-to’ construction): (1) She refused to do her homework. (2) Laura kept reading love stories. (3) *He avoids to listen to loud music. This construction is particularly interesting because learners often show choices of a complement type different from those of native speakers (e.g. Gries & Wulff 2009; Martinez‐Garcia & Wulff 2012) as illustrated in (3) and is commonly claimed to be difficult to be taught by explicit rules (see e.g. Petrovitz 2001). By triangulating different types of usage data (corpus and elicited production data) and analysing these by multivariate statistical tests, the effects of different usage-related factors (e.g. frequency, proficiency level of the learner, semantic class of verb, etc.) on the representation and development of the catenative verb construction and its subschemas (i.e. target-to and target-ing construction) were examined. In particular, it was assessed whether they can predict a native-like form-meaning pairing of a catenative verb and non-finite complement. First, all studies were able to show a robust effect of frequency on the complement choice. Frequency does not only lead to the entrenchment of high-frequency exemplars of the construction but is also found to motivate a taxonomic generalisation across related exemplars and the representation of a more abstract schema. Second, the results indicate that the target-to construction, due to its higher type and token frequency, has a high degree of schematicity and productivity than the target-ing construction for the learners, which allows for analogical comparisons and pattern extension with less entrenched exemplars. This schema is likely to be overgeneralised to (less frequent) target-ing verbs because the learners perceive formal and semantic compatibility between the unknown/infrequent verb and this pattern. Furthermore, the findings present evidence that less advanced learners (A2-B2) make more coarse-grained generalisations, which are centred around high-frequency and prototypical exemplars/low-scope patterns. In the case of high-proficiency learners (C1-C2), not only does the number of native-like complement choices increase but relational information, such as the semantic subclasses of the verb, form-function contingency and other factors, becomes also relevant for a target-like choice. Thus, the results suggests that with increasing usage experience learners gradually develop a more fine-grained, interconnected representation of the catenative verb construction, which gains more resemblance to the form-meaning mappings of native speakers. Taken together, these insights highlight the importance for language learning and teaching environments to acknowledge that L2 knowledge is represented in the form of highly interconnected form-meaning pairings, i.e. constructions, that can be found on different levels of abstraction and complexity.

The positive consequences of performance pay on the wages and productivity have been well documented in the last decades. Yet, the increased pressure and work commitment associated with performance pay suggest that performance pay may have unintended negative consequences on worker’s health and well-being. As firms increasingly use performance pay worldwide, it becomes crucial to evaluate positive and negative consequences of performance pay. Thus, Chapters 2 – 4 of this doctoral thesis investigate the unintended adverse consequences of performance pay on stress, alcohol consumption, and loneliness, respectively. Chapter 5 investigates the positive role of performance pay on mitigating the overeducation wage penalty and enhancing labor market position of overeducated workers. In Chapter 2, together with John S. Heywood and Uwe Jirjahn, I examine the hypothesis that performance pay is positively associated with employee stress. Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find performance pay consistently and importantly associates with greater stress even controlling for a long list of economic, social, and personality characteristics. The finding also holds in instrumental variable estimations accounting for the potential endogeneity of performance pay. Moreover, I show that risk tolerance and locus of control moderate the relationship between performance pay and stress. Among workers receiving performance pay, the risk tolerant and those believing they can control their environment suffer to a lesser degree from stress. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between performance pay and alcohol use. Together with John S. Heywood and Uwe Jirjahn, I examine the hypothesis that alcohol use as “self-medication” is a natural response to the stress and uncertainty associated with performance pay. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find that the likelihood of consuming each of four types of alcohol (beer, wine, spirits, and mixed drinks) is higher for those receiving performance pay even controlling for a long list of economic, social, and personality characteristics and in sensible instrumental variable estimates. I also show that the number of types of alcohol consumed is larger for those receiving performance pay and that the intensity of consumption increases. Moreover, I find that risk tolerance and gender moderate the relationship between performance pay and alcohol use. In Chapter 4, I examine the hypothesis that performance pay increases the risk of employee loneliness due to increased stress, job commitment, and uncooperativeness associated with performance pay. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find that performance pay is positively associated with both the incidence and intensity of loneliness. Correspondingly, performance pay decreases the social life satisfaction of workers. The findings also hold in instrumental variable estimations addressing the potential endogeneity of performance pay and in various robustness checks. Interestingly, investigating the potential role of moderating factors reveals that the association between performance pay and loneliness is particularly large for private sector employees. Finally, in Chapter 5, I study the association between overeducation, performance pay, and wages. Overeducated workers are more productive and have higher wages in comparison to their adequately educated coworkers in the same jobs. However, they face a series of challenges in the labor market, including lower wages in comparison to their similarly educated peers who are in correctly matched jobs. Yet, less consensus exists over the adjustment mechanisms to overcome the negative consequences of overeducation. In this study, I examine the hypotheses that overeducated workers sort into performance pay jobs as an adjustment mechanism and that performance pay enhances their wages. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, I show that overeducation associates with a higher likelihood of sorting into performance pay jobs and that performance pay moderates the wages of overeducated workers positively. It also holds in endogenous switching regressions accounting for the potential endogeneity of performance pay. Importantly, I show that the positive role of performance pay is particularly larger for the wages of overeducated women.

This study examines the discipline of English studies in South Africa through a review of articles published in 11 academic journals over the period 1958"2004. The aims are to gain a better understanding of the functions of peer-reviewed journals, to reveal the presence of rules governing discursive production, and to uncover the historical shifts in approach and choice of disciplinary objects. The Foucauldian typology of procedures determining discursive production, that is: exclusionary, internal and restrictive procedures, is applied to the discipline of English studies in order to elucidate the existence of such procedures in the discipline. Each journal is reviewed individually and comparatively. Static and chronological statistical analyses are undertaken on the articles in the 11 journals in order to provide empirical evidence to subvert the contention that the discipline is unruly and its choice of objects random. The cumulative results of this analysis are used to describe the major shifts primarily in ranges of disciplinary objects, but also in metadiscursive and thematic debates. Each of the journals is characterised in relation to what the overall analysis reveals about the mainstream developments. The two main findings are that, during the period under review, South African imaginative written artefacts have moved from a marginal position to the centre of focus of the discipline; and that the conception of what constitutes the "literary" has returned to a pre-Practical criticism definition, broadly inclusive of a variety of types of artefact including imaginative writing, such as autobiography, letters, journals and orature.