Quality Product differentiation in Cee-Eu Intra-Industry Trade

In this paper we compute price/quality gap indicators to measure vertical intra-iundustry trade (VIIT) in EU markets at 3-digit NACE industry level. These indicators are then used to test some hypotheses relative to the determinants of the quality of trade of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). Two underlying models of VIIT are tested: a neo-H-O model (Falvey, 1981; Falvey- Kierzkowski, 1987), based on factor endowment, and an “economic geography” model, based on market size and economic integration (Greenaway-Torstensson, 1997). The explanatory variables (proxies for human capital, physical capital, market size and market integration) affect the dependent variable (unit-value differences) with relevant and significant coefficients. The negative sign for the variable human capital, interacted with the dummy for CEECs, suggests the existence of comparative disadvantages in the high-skill sectors for these countries. Moreover, the lower market size of CEECs could strengthen their disadvantage in high quality segments of production. However, the geographic proximity to the core of Europe and the integration process, which are strongly correlated with high quality trade, could make faster the process of catching up.neo H-O Models of Trade; Quality differentiation; Economic geography; Intra-industry trade; Economic integration;

On optimally partitioning a text to improve its compression

In this paper we investigate the problem of partitioning an input string T in such a way that compressing individually its parts via a base-compressor C gets a compressed output that is shorter than applying C over the entire T at once. This problem was introduced in the context of table compression, and then further elaborated and extended to strings and trees. Unfortunately, the literature offers poor solutions: namely, we know either a cubic-time algorithm for computing the optimal partition based on dynamic programming, or few heuristics that do not guarantee any bounds on the efficacy of their computed partition, or algorithms that are efficient but work in some specific scenarios (such as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform) and achieve compression performance that might be worse than the optimal-partitioning by a $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n})$ factor. Therefore, computing efficiently the optimal solution is still open. In this paper we provide the first algorithm which is guaranteed to compute in O(n \log_{1+\eps}n) time a partition of T whose compressed output is guaranteed to be no more than $(1+\epsilon)$-worse the optimal one, where $\epsilon$ may be any positive constant

The impact of FDI on firm survival in Italy

The aim of the analysis is to investigate the impact of inward FDI on Italian manufacturing and services firm survival. The paper is organized in two steps. First, we carry out theoretically and empirically the analysis of firm survival distinguishing between foreign multinationals, domestic multinationals and domestic non multinational firms. The empirical analysis is based on survival functions as well as a Cox proportional hazard model, controlling for firm and industry specific covariates. Second, we examine the effect of foreign presence on the survival of host country firms distinguishing between the impact on Italian-owned (indigenous) multinational and non multinational firms and on other foreign-owned firms (i.e., other MNEs) located in the host country. The finding reveals that during the period 2005-2007 while manufacturing and service firms owned by foreign MNEs are more likely to exit the market than national firms, on the other hand domestic MNEs have a higher chance of survival. These results stand even when other firm and industry specific variables are controlled for. This result support the idea that foreign MNEs are inherently footloose while Italian MNEs are more firmly rooted in the local economy. The estimates also indicate that older, larger and more productive firms have higher survival rates. Finally, firm survival of foreign MNEs and domestic MNEs is unaffected by the increased presence of foreign MNEs. On the other hand, the increased foreign presence has a positive impact on Italian non-MNEs’ survival only in the service sector.Domestic firms, Multinational Enterprises, Survival Analysis

Compressed Text Indexes:From Theory to Practice!

A compressed full-text self-index represents a text in a compressed form and still answers queries efficiently. This technology represents a breakthrough over the text indexing techniques of the previous decade, whose indexes required several times the size of the text. Although it is relatively new, this technology has matured up to a point where theoretical research is giving way to practical developments. Nonetheless this requires significant programming skills, a deep engineering effort, and a strong algorithmic background to dig into the research results. To date only isolated implementations and focused comparisons of compressed indexes have been reported, and they missed a common API, which prevented their re-use or deployment within other applications. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. First, we present the existing implementations of compressed indexes from a practitioner's point of view. Second, we introduce the Pizza&Chili site, which offers tuned implementations and a standardized API for the most successful compressed full-text self-indexes, together with effective testbeds and scripts for their automatic validation and test. Third, we show the results of our extensive experiments on these codes with the aim of demonstrating the practical relevance of this novel and exciting technology

Il fantasma di Banfield: una verifica empirica della teoria del familismo amorale

National audienceAmoral familism is a sociological theory, constantly referred to explain the lack of collective action in the south of Italy and other geographical areas, and highly influential in different fields, i.e. political sociology, anthropology, business studies, economics, and psychology. This paper moves from the current theoretical debate to an empirical verification of amoral familism using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and EVS dataset (1999-2000). The findings suggest a paradox: amoral familists are less incline to collective action; however, amoral familism does not explain the lack of collective action among southern Italians. We conclude affirming the general validity of Banfield theory and explaining the incorrect association between amoral familism and southern Italian ethos

WISER: A Semantic Approach for Expert Finding in Academia based on Entity Linking

We present WISER, a new semantic search engine for expert finding in academia. Our system is unsupervised and it jointly combines classical language modeling techniques, based on text evidences, with the Wikipedia Knowledge Graph, via entity linking. WISER indexes each academic author through a novel profiling technique which models her expertise with a small, labeled and weighted graph drawn from Wikipedia. Nodes in this graph are the Wikipedia entities mentioned in the author's publications, whereas the weighted edges express the semantic relatedness among these entities computed via textual and graph-based relatedness functions. Every node is also labeled with a relevance score which models the pertinence of the corresponding entity to author's expertise, and is computed by means of a proper random-walk calculation over that graph; and with a latent vector representation which is learned via entity and other kinds of structural embeddings derived from Wikipedia. At query time, experts are retrieved by combining classic document-centric approaches, which exploit the occurrences of query terms in the author's documents, with a novel set of profile-centric scoring strategies, which compute the semantic relatedness between the author's expertise and the query topic via the above graph-based profiles. The effectiveness of our system is established over a large-scale experimental test on a standard dataset for this task. We show that WISER achieves better performance than all the other competitors, thus proving the effectiveness of modelling author's profile via our "semantic" graph of entities. Finally, we comment on the use of WISER for indexing and profiling the whole research community within the University of Pisa, and its application to technology transfer in our University

Does Family Policy Influence Women’s Employment?: Reviewing the Evidence in the Field

During the past two decades, the debate over the relation between family policy and women’s employment in high-income countries has grown in prominence. Nevertheless, the evidence proposed in different disciplines – sociology, politics, economics and demography – remains scattered and fragmented. This article addresses this gap, discussing whether family policy regimes are converging and how different policies influence women’s employment outcomes in high-income countries. The main findings can be summarized as follows: family policy regimes (‘Primary Caregiver Strategy’, ‘Choice Strategy’, ‘Primary Earner Strategy’, ‘Earning Carer Strategy’, ‘Mediterranean Model’) continues to shape women’s employment outcomes despite some process of convergence towards the Earning Carer Strategy; the shortage of childcare and the absence of maternal leave curtail women’s employment; long parental leave seems to put a brake to women’s employment; unconditional child benefits and joint couple’s taxation negatively influence women’s employment but support horizontal redistribution; policies and collective attitudes interact, influencing women’s behaviour in the labour market; and the effect of policies is moderated/magnified by individual socioeconomic characteristics, that is, skills, class, education, income, ethnicity and marital status. The article concludes by suggesting avenues for future research