On the 'conquest' of inflation

Sargent (1999) warns that if policymakersÂ’ views on the unemployment - inflation tradeoff are driven by empirical correlations rather than theory, disinflations (escapes from high to low inflation) may periodically occurr but are not bound to last. This paper asks how different inflation objectives on the part of the policymaker affect this result. We show that escapes in the neighborhood of zero inflation are less frequent and have a shorter duration as policy objectives become more inflation-averse. A sufficiently (but not infinitely) inflationaverse policymaker never escapes Nash inflation and, on average, yields a lower inflation rate.inflation bias, disinflation, learning, conservative bankers

Oil and the macroeconomy: a quantitative structural analysis

We consider an economy in which the oil costs, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to fundamental domestic and external demand and supply shocks. We estimate the effects of these structural shocks on US monthly data for the 1973.1-2007.12 period using robust sign restrictions suggested by theory. The interplay between the oil market and the US economy goes in both directions. About 20% of changes in the cost of oil come in response to US aggregate demand shocks, while shocks originating in the oil market also affect the US economy, the impact depending on the nature of the shock: a negative oil supply shock reduces US output, whereas a positive oil demand shock has a positive and persistent effect on GDP.Business cycle; Oil prices; Structural VAR

Biological variation: back to basics

Biological variation: back to basics

In mezzo al guado. La governance subregionale tra «vecchie» province e «nuove» aree vaste

An ongoing change in regional governance triggered by the Delrio Law (No. 56/2014) led to a differentiated landscape across the country. This reshaping consists more in provisional, inertial and somehow random tendencies than in governance models that are consolidating. What emerges is a not homogeneous system under a variable geometry. The final result is that although transitional, these governance models can mark a divide be-tween first movers – which started a rescaling process – and late comer regions – which did not and thus lag behind, still in midstream. Yet, like all policy legacies, this divide can significantly impact future centre-periphery relations

Dealing with minor illnesses: the link between primary care characteristics and First Aid Clinics’ attendancesA

The reformulation of existing boundaries between primary and secondary care, in order to shift selected services traditionally provided by Emergency Departments to community-based alternatives has determined a variety of organisational solutions aimed at reducing the ED overcrowding. One innovative change has been the introduction of fast-track systems for minor injuries or illnesses, whereby community care providers are involved in order to divert patients away from EDs. These facilities offer an open-access service for patients not requiring hospital treatments, and may be staffed by nurses and/or primary care general practitioners operating within, or alongside, the ED. To date little research has been undertaken on such experiences. To fill this gap, we analyse a First-aid clinic (FaC) in the Italian city of Parma, consisting of a minor injury unit located alongside the teaching hospital’s ED. We examine the link between the utilisation rates of the FaC and primary care characteristics, focusing on the main organisational features of the practices and estimating panel count data models for 2007-2010. Our main findings indicate that the younger cohorts are heavy users of the FaC and that the extension of practice opening hours significantly lowers the number of attendances, after controlling for GP’s and practice’s characteristics

Switch-out and switch-in: what motivates the decision makers in Italian occupational pension funds?

To switch presumes two kinds of transactions carried out by the same person: on the one hand, the decision to exit an investment line (switch-out) and, on the other hand, the decision to enter into a new investment line (switch-in). What motivates the decision makers? This paper, considering a sample of Italian occupational pension funds, investigates the impact of short-term and long-term performance on the switch decision process and whether the same performance can lead investors to make opposite switch decisions. Some irrational behaviors are identified

The Role of Wealth in Gain and Loss Perception: An Empirical Analysis

People with significantly different initial starting capitals may perceive gains and losses differently. In order to test this hypothesis, we consider and compare two samples of investors: retail investors as those with a maximum of €500,000 worth of assets under management (AUM) and private investors as those with more than €500,000 AUM. Based on the answers obtained from specifically devised questionnaires, we test the differences in gain and loss perception and check the level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction in situations of gain and loss. The results obtained demonstrate that private and retail investors perceive gains and losses differently

Multi-Task Attentive Residual Networks for Argument Mining

We explore the use of residual networks and neural attention for argument mining and in particular link prediction. The method we propose makes no assumptions on document or argument structure. We propose a residual architecture that exploits attention, multi-task learning, and makes use of ensemble. We evaluate it on a challenging data set consisting of user-generated comments, as well as on two other datasets consisting of scientific publications. On the user-generated content dataset, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods that rely on domain knowledge. On the scientific literature datasets it achieves results comparable to those yielded by BERT-based approaches but with a much smaller model size.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning System

Attention in Natural Language Processing

Attention is an increasingly popular mechanism used in a wide range of neural architectures. The mechanism itself has been realized in a variety of formats. However, because of the fast-paced advances in this domain, a systematic overview of attention is still missing. In this article, we define a unified model for attention architectures in natural language processing, with a focus on those designed to work with vector representations of the textual data. We propose a taxonomy of attention models according to four dimensions: the representation of the input, the compatibility function, the distribution function, and the multiplicity of the input and/or output. We present the examples of how prior information can be exploited in attention models and discuss ongoing research efforts and open challenges in the area, providing the first extensive categorization of the vast body of literature in this exciting domain