We show that the closure of the compactly supported mapping class group of an infinite type surface is not perfect and that its abelianization contains a direct summand isomorphic to ⊕ 2 ℵ 0 Q. We also extend this to the Torelli group and show that in the case of surfaces with infinite genus the abelianization of the Torelli group contains an indivisible copy of ⊕ 2 ℵ 0 Z as well. Finally we give an application to the question of automatic continuity by exhibiting discontinuous homomorphisms to Q.

This paper evaluates the conjecture that factory managers may not be offering a cost-minimizing configuration of compensation and workplace amenities by using manager and worker survey data from Better Work Vietnam. Working conditions are found to have a significant positive impact on global life assessments and reduce measures of depression and traumatic stress. We find significant deviations in manager perceptions of working conditions from those of workers. These deviations significantly impact a worker's perception of well-being and indicators of mental health. Such deviations may lead the factory manager to underprovide certain workplace amenities relative to the cost-minimizing configuration, which may in part explain the persistence of relatively poor working conditions in developing economies.

We show that the closure of the compactly supported mapping class group of an infinite-type surface is not perfect and that its abelianization contains a direct summand isomorphic to ⊕ 2 ℵ 0 Q. We also extend this to the Torelli group and show that in the case of surfaces with infinite genus the abelianization of the Torelli group contains an indivisible copy of ⊕ 2 ℵ 0 Z as well. Finally we give an application to the question of automatic continuity by exhibiting discontinuous homomorphisms to Q.

We prove that the first integral cohomology of pure mapping class groups of infinite type genus one surfaces is trivial. For genus zero surfaces we prove that not every homomorphism to Z factors through a sphere with finitely many punctures. In fact, we get an uncountable family of such maps.

We discuss the large-scale geometry of pure mapping class groups of locally finite, infinite graphs, motivated from recent work by Algom-Kfir-Bestvina [1] and the work of Mann-Rafi [12] on the large-scale geometry of mapping class groups of infinitetype surfaces. Using the framework of Rosendal for coarse geometry of non-locally compact groups, we classify when the pure mapping class group of a locally finite, infinite graph is globally coarsely bounded (an analog of compact) and when it is locally coarsely bounded (an analog of locally compact).Our techniques also give lower bounds on the first integral cohomology of the pure mapping class group for some graphs and show that some of these groups have continuous actions on simplicial trees.