Archivio istituzionale della Ricerca - Bocconi
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Le traiettorie regolative del diritto del lavoro alla prova delle trasformazioni tra rivoluzione digitale e cambiamenti demografici: verso una forma di “accomodamento tecnologico”?
No full textIl contributo parte dall’assunto che l’invecchiamento della forza lavoro e la trasformazione digitale
dovrebbero ridefinire categorie, tutele e pratiche del diritto del lavoro, con particolare attenzione ai lavoratori anziani. Dopo una ricognizione definitoria dell’“older worker”, l’articolo pone l’attenzione su come la rivoluzione digitale ponga il rapporto tra lavoro e soggetti anziani di fronte a due esiti possibili: da un lato l’esclusione (demansionamento, espulsione, precarizzazione); dall’altro l’inclusione (qualificazione, apprendimento continuo, trasferimento di conoscenze). L’esito dipende dalla cornice regolativa e dalle scelte organizzative. l’A. insiste sulla necessità di riconoscere sia il capitale esperienziale degli older workers sia la loro posizione di fragilità al cospetto della digitalizzazione del mondo del lavoro. Condizione che dovrebbe essere protetta non solo con obblighi formativi, ma anche “accomodamenti tecnologici”. Vengono esaminati vincoli e opportunità del diritto UE e
interno, delineando un approccio age-sensitive alla valutazione dei rischi e alla tutela della professionalità quale riflesso della dignità. Il contributo conclude che la valorizzazione degli aspetti partecipativi e del ruolo dell’attore collettivo affinché le regole applicate al rapporto di lavoro possano garantire un’occupazione di qualità anche rispetto alle sfide della rivoluzione digitale in corso
Essays in Labour Economics
No full textThis thesis comprises three self-contained chapters. In these, I examine how non-wage factors and institutional frictions shape labour market outcomes and welfare at the individual and country level.
The first chapter investigates how co-parenting following divorce affects parents' labour market outcomes. Exploiting a Dutch reform that raised co-parenting uptake, I find that mothers' wages decline by 0.8% in an intention-to-treat framework post-reform, and that this effect rises to a substantial 10% wage loss for mothers who adopt co-parenting due to the reform (the complier population). This impact is driven by reduced geographical mobility, which constrains mothers from moving to access better-paid employment. Fathers’ wages remain unchanged. The findings highlight an efficiency cost of co-parenting that falls disproportionately on mothers, thereby widening the gender wage gap.
The second chapter examines the role of non-wage factors in the labour market. Using a large-scale Dutch survey linked to administrative data, we find that workplace amenities - such as flexibility, workload, and social support -, like wages, strongly predict job satisfaction, search, absenteeism, and mobility. We document that desirable amenities are often bundled with high-paying jobs, which amplifies overall compensation inequality.
The final chapter turns to international capital markets and documents that foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are procyclical while remittances are countercyclical with respect to recipient-country GDP growth. Estimating a model of both capital flows jointly, we evaluate how policies that lower barriers to these flows can enhance risk-sharing and improve welfare. The results show that reducing the cost of either enhances cross-border risk sharing, but the welfare gains from cheaper remittances dominate.
Taken together, the essays reveal how location constraints, worker sorting based on amenities, and cross-border capital flows influence the allocation of human and financial capital, with implications for gender inequality, job design, and macroeconomic risk sharing
Corporate governance and dealing with the board
No full textThis chapter considers the challenges and benefits of developing a proper corporate governance structure and policy while expanding as a venture. Although the public debate over corporate governance seems to focus on public companies, an effective governance structure is equally important for startups and private companies. In fact, given the stronger link between the financing and investment decision in startups as compared to public companies, the question of how to
structure agreements between investors and entrepreneurs that ensure that their own benefits and responsibilities are met is particularly relevant.
Corporate governance is not simply about the board of directors and their activities: that only represents the tip of the iceberg. It is a more complex set of rules, regulations, and etiquettes that regulate the responsibilities and authority of shareholders and management, directed towards the achievement of the goals in the business plan and agreement on how to deal with business strategy.
Topics to be decided upon include the legal structure of the firm, its board size and structure, share remuneration, and veto rights. More generally, in the case of startups, the challenge is to strike a balance between allowing investors to benefit from their investment and to secure it somehow, while at the same time preventing them from appropriating the entrepreneurs’ venture and role
Conjugate Gradient and Alternating Minimization for High-Dimensional Statistical Models
No full textIn many contemporary applications of statistics and machine learning — such as recommendation systems, network analysis, and genomics — data can be represented as large, sparse matrices in which only a small fraction of the entries are observed. We refer to these matrices as high-dimensional, since the number of variables (e.g., individuals, or genes) can be very large, often in the order of hundreds of thousands or even millions. In contrast, the number of observations, which correspond to non-zero entries, is not quadratic in the number of variables. As a result, the sparsity of the matrices increases with dimensionality. For instance, in the case of the MovieLens dataset, which contains ratings of movies, the proportion of observed ratings decreases from approximately 1% to 0.1% as the number of users and movies increases from tens to hundreds of thousands. This poses serious challenges for the application of traditional statistical methods, which often rely on factorizations of such matrices, such as the singular value decomposition or the Cholesky decomposition, that may be computationally infeasible in high-dimensional settings, even if optimized for sparse matrices. Iterative algorithms are a popular alternative to address these challenges, as they can provide approximate solutions without requiring full matrix decompositions. These methods have a cheap computational cost per iteration, usually linear in the number of variables and observations, and are memory-efficient, requiring storage only of the current iterate. However, in high-dimensional settings, specific features of the models or the data can lead to ill-conditioned regions in the variable space. This makes the exploration slower as the dimension increases, resulting in a larger number of iterations for convergence. In this thesis, we investigate two iterative algorithms: the conjugate gradient method applied to linear mixed models and the alternating least squares algorithm for the matrix completion problem. We provide a detailed analysis of their convergence in high-dimensional settings, propose strategies to speed up the exploration of problematic regions, and show that these strategies make the algorithms converge in a number of iterations that is independent of the dimension
The Subsidiarity of Unjustified Enrichment
No full textThe objective of this contribution is, therefore, to assess whether the theory and practice of private law should move away from the subsidiarity of unjustified enrichment altogether.4 To this end, a mapping of civil law and common law jurisdictions where this doctrine or rule has been established will be conducted (section I.B). Furthermore, the vast array of different interpretations and applications of this doctrine or rule will be analysed (section I.C), with a particular focus on the two extremes of the spectrum: the strong (or in abstracto) and weak (or in concreto) versions of subsidiarity. It will then be shown that, in the legal systems considered, there is a general trend towards abandoning (or at least mitigating) the doctrine or rule of subsidiarity of unjustified enrichment, both in theory and in practice. This is due to the perception that this doctrine or rule is inconsistent, superfluous, or at the very least incapable of rationalizing the case law on unjustified enrichment and providing it with a logically satisfactory foundation (section I.D). Subsequently, the chapter will explore the theoretical and practical issues arising from the intersections of unjustified enrichment with the three other core areas of private law, that is, contract (section II), property (section III), and tort (section IV), focusing on the mechanisms that regulate the overlap of remedies within each domain. The conclusion (section V) is that the doctrine or rule of subsidiarity should be abandoned. It persists merely as a historical remnant of the original foundation of unjustified enrichment on purely equitable grounds. Subsidiarity was formulated in contexts where claims in unjustified enrichment as such were established as exceptional corrective measures to the strict application of the law, rather than as occurrences of a necessary structural principle. However, with the integration of unjustified enrichment into codified law, or its incorporation into legal systems in other forms, a subsidiarity- based approach appears outdated, if not entirely untenable. In other words, the fear that the restitutionary claims at stake might undermine existing legal structures is unfounded, as unjust enrichment is now an integral and regulated part of the law. Concurrently, to prevent unjust enrichment from extending beyond its proper scope, it remains crucial precisely to define its essential elements, especially the requirement of ‘at the claimant’s expense’
The term sheet and negotiating with investors
No full textInvestments in early-stage ventures are characterized by being private and by their ‘equity nature’, as discussed in the previous chapters, stressing the mutual dependence between investor and entrepreneur. Moreover, the investment is typically temporary and done between so-called ‘perfect strangers’ – that is, both parties have large information asymmetry and are faced with agency challenges yet will be condemned to one another because of the illiquid nature of the investment.
Compare it to getting married to someone you have just met while being certain that you will separate after a few years, so surely needing a proper prenup. For the time that you will be together, you want to delineate mutual expectations, pertaining to both day-to-day and medium-term behaviour, from both the investor’s and entrepreneur’s point of view. While the end goal of the investor and the shareholders of the company are the same– the creation of value – expectations as to how and when this is achieved might differ. Also, circumstances may change
and require an upfront agreement on how to deal with these circumstances so as to prevent conflicts on, for example, the duration of investor involvement, the strategies used to raise company value, financial and industrial alliances, and new opportunities that modify the pre-investment situation. Both investor and entrepreneur will try to solve all potential disagreements before formally partnering;
however, it is impossible to forecast the future and make arrangements for every eventuality
Informatica, diritto, intelligenza artificiale
No full textIl testo offre una panoramica sistematica dei principali temi dell’informatica giuridica e del Legal Tech, analizzando l’impatto che le tecnologie digitali hanno avuto e continuano ad avere sul diritto, con particolare attenzione alle nuove frontiere dell’Intelligenza Artificiale. L’opera si propone come uno strumento di supporto per il giurista contemporaneo, sia sotto il pro? lo pratico sia sotto quello teorico-giuridico. Dal punto di vista operativo, il volume approfondisce le modalità di ricerca dell’informazione giuridica attraverso i siti istituzionali, la redazione dei testi giuridici, il processo telematico e la fatturazione elettronica. Sul piano giuridico, invece, vengono analizzati temi di grande attualità quali la sicurezza informatica, il trattamento dei dati personali, il diritto d’autore delle opere digitali, l’identità digitale e la firma elettronica, nonché fenomeni emergenti come il metaverso, i bitcoin, i cybercrime e la digital forensics
Essays on Information, Politics, and Digital Media
No full textDigital technologies are transforming how individuals access and engage with information, with consequences that can be beneficial or detrimental to society. While broader access to information offers clear advantages, substantial evidence also documents negative side effects, including the spread of misinformation, increased distraction, and the decline of traditional information media. These developments have wide-ranging implications for individuals' opinions and behavior, from voters selecting competent representatives to researchers identifying relevant scientific questions. Given the pace and scope of these transformations, many important questions about the societal effects of digital media remain unanswered.
This dissertation contains three chapters that empirically examine distinct settings in which contemporary digital media shape individuals' opinions and behavior.
In the first chapter, I show that the introduction of paywalls on US newspaper websites reduced political knowledge and electoral participation. By restricting access to information, paywalls pushed individuals who were unwilling or unable to pay for subscriptions away from traditional news, lowering their engagement with politics.
The second chapter develops a novel instrumental variable to demonstrate that economists' usage of Twitter (now X) increased the number of publications and citations. The platform facilitated professional networking and encouraged the selection of research topics with greater relevance, both within academia and among the broader public.
In the third chapter, I show that disruptive protests by a German environmental activist group failed to shift public opinion on climate policy despite generating substantial media coverage, suggesting limits to the persuasive power of media attention alone
Statistical Physics of Generative Diffusion
No full textThis thesis investigates diffusion models with a statistical physics point of view, focusing on phase transitions and symmetry breaking events.
First, we analyze the reverse diffusion process under the empirical score function for structured data. What we obtain is the description of a dynamical landscape and the characterization of the most important transition times, namely the memorization time. We also give a definition of generalization in this context, observing that interestingly it always happens after the model starts memorizing.
Then, we give a geometric description, exploring the spectral properties of the score function using tools from random matrix theory. By analyzing the Jacobian spectra of the score, we identify the emergence of geometric phases linked to spectral gaps.
We also study the phenomenon of geometric memorization, demonstrating that it is characterized by a loss of dimensionality where some features of the data are memorized without a full collapse on any individual training point.
Finally, we investigate the speciation transition of diffusion models in a case where data are not spatially separated. We obtain a general criterion for the speciation time, as well as its scaling.
This thesis thus provides both theoretical insights and empirical analyses that bridge deep learning and statistical physics, contributing to a deeper understanding of how generative models learn and represent data