83 research outputs found
ROSE-L and Sentinel-1 soil moisture retrieval: a simulated study
No full textIn the frame of the Copernicus Expansion Program, it is foreseen the launch of two L-band SAR satellites flying in constellation with Sentinel-1. This will offer an unprecedent opportunity of collecting data at L-band and C-band in a systematic and coordinated way. This study focuses on soil moisture retrieval applications and investigates the performances of a dual frequency multiplatform retrieval approach based on a simulated study. The objective is to assess the pros and cons of a coincident acquisition of C and L-band data, which is expected to improve the retrieval accuracy, with respect to an alternate acquisition of the two platforms that, on the contrary, would drastically reduce the revisit time of the System of Systems from 6 to 3 days or less. It was found that, if a multitemporal retrieval approach is exploited, the alternate acquisitions can provide retrieval accuracy better than individual acquisitions at each frequency, and close to that of coincident acquisitions, while keeping a much better temporal resolution of the soil moisture products
Juvenile delinquency and conformism
No full textThis article studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed data set of adolescent friendship networks. A novel social network-based empirical strategy allows us to identify peer effects for different types of crimes. We find that conformity plays an important role for all crimes, especially for petty crimes. This suggests that, for juvenile crime, an effective policy should be measured not only by the possible crime reduction it implies but also by the group interactions it engenders. © 2009 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved
Why do educated mothers matter? A model of parental help
No full textThe paper investigates the role of mothers in affecting childrens' performance at school. It develops a theoretical model in which household is treated as an individual, whose utility depends on the performance at school of the student and on consumption. The model focuses on the possibilities through which mother’s help may affect pupil's performance in terms of time devoted to supervision and spillover effects. Empirical evidence, using Italian PISA 2006, shows that highly educated mothers have a positive impact on students' score only when they are highly qualified in the job market.Education; PISA; quantile regressions; parental help
Current concepts on oxidative/carbonyl stress, inflammation and epigenetics in pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
No full textChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a global health problem. The current therapies for COPD are poorly effective and the mainstays of pharmacotherapy are bronchodilators. A better understanding of the pathobiology of COPD is critical for the development of novel therapies. In the present review, we have discussed the roles of oxidative/aldehyde stress, inflammation/immunity, and chromatin remodeling in the pathogenesis of COPD. An imbalance of oxidants/antioxidants caused by cigarette smoke and other pollutants/biomass fuels plays an important role in the pathogenesis of COPD by regulating redox-sensitive transcription factors (e.g., NF-κB), autophagy and unfolded protein response leading to chronic lung inflammatory response. Cigarette smoke also activates canonical/alternative NF-κB pathways and their upstream kinases leading to sustained inflammatory response in lungs. Recently, epigenetic regulation has been shown to be critical for the development of COPD because the expression/activity of enzymes that regulate these epigenetic modifications have been reported to be abnormal in airways of COPD patients. Hence, the significant advances made in understanding the pathophysiology of COPD as described herein will identify novel therapeutic targets for intervention in COPD
What are borders made of? An analysis of barriers to European banking integration
No full textLinguistic and cultural differences, different legal and supervisory frameworks, relationship lending have been repeatedly mentioned as barriers to European retail banking integration. We investigate whether these barriers have affected integration within national boundaries, using an index of localism of regional banking systems as a measure of market integration. If local banks are established and flourish because asymmetric information makes entry difficult for non-incumbents (DellÂ’Ariccia, 2001) or regulatory and governance rules prevent entry from outside (Berger et al., 1995), we should find a significant relationship between indicators of these barriers and measures of the localism of banking systems. Our results show that this is indeed the case for asymmetric information, while findings are more blurred for supervisory practices.banking integration, barriers, asymmetric information
On applying synthetic indices of multidimensional well-being: health and income inequalities in selected EU countries
No full textThe multidimensional view of well-being is receiving growing attention, both in academic research and policy-oriented analysis. This paper examines empirical strategies to measure poverty and inequality in multiple domains, concentrating on two problems in the use of synthetic multidimensional indices: the weighting structure of different functionings and the functional form of the index. These problems are illustrated by comparing inequality and deprivation in income and health in the four largest countries of the EU: France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.inequality, poverty, multidimensional analysis, capability approach
Innovation driven sectoral shocks and aggregate city cycles
No full textThis paper formalizes one mechanism through which diversification in the production of research & development across firms located in a city dampens volatility in the local labor market, improves the incentives to perform research & development and smooths the aggregate business cycle fluctuations of a city. This is done by adapting the standard multi-sector quality ladder model (Grossman and Helpman 1991) in order to allow for heterogeneity across firms, thus taking into account knowledge spillovers across heterogenous sectors, knowledge accumulation, pecuniary externalities and segmented labor markets. As a result, according to the local degree of diversification in research & development, sectoral technological shocks have an influence on the current choice of research & development and the location of production, and in turn on local business cycles and the life cycle of the city: diversification in research & development allows innovations in different sectors of the city to arrive at different points in time, thus avoiding to put pressure on the local labor markets and keeping wage discipline. This permits firms located in the city to perform enough research & development and possibly beat outside competition in discovering and manufacturing new products, thus growing -at the aggregate city level-through less volatile cycles.quality ladder with heterogeneity across firms, labor pooling economies, knowledge spillovers, diversification, schumpeterian growth in the city
Agglomeration within and between regions: Two econometric based indicators
No full textWe propose two indexes to measure the agglomeration forces acting within and between different regions. Unlike the existing measures of agglomeration, our model-based indexes allow for simultaneous treatment of both aspects. Local plant diffusion in a given industry is modelled as a spatial error components process (SEC). Maximum likelihood inference on model parameters is dealt with, including the problem of data censoring. The statistical properties of standard agglomeration indexes in the data environment provided by our SEC model are then treated. Finally, our methodology is applied to Italian census data for both manufacturing and service industries.agglomeration, spatial autocorrelation, spatial error components model
Family Succession and Firm Performance: Evidence from Italian Family Firms
No full textThis article contributes to the growing empirical literature on family firms by studying the impact of the founder–chief executive officer (CEO) succession in a sample of Italian firms. We contrast firms that continue to be managed within the family by the heirs to the founders with firms in which the management is passed on to outsiders. Family successions, that is, successions by the founder’s heirs, are further analyzed by assessing the impact of the sectoral intensity of competition on the post-succession performance. This analysis also addresses the endogeneity in the timing of the CEO succession by controlling for a pure mean-reversion effect in the firm’s performance. We find that the maintenance of management within the family has a negative impact on the firm’s performance, and this effect is largely borne by the good performers, especially in the more competitive sectors. These results indicate that there is no inherent superiority of the family-firm structure and emphasize the importance of conducting an analysis of governance in a variety of institutional settings.Family successions; Family firms; Founder-run firms
The Survival of the Conformist: Social Pressure and Renewable Resource Management
No full textThis paper examines the role of pro-social behavior as a mechanism for the establishment and maintenance of cooperation in resource use under variable social and environmental conditions. By coupling resource stock dynamics with social dynamics concerning compliance to a social norm prescribing non-excessive resource extraction in a common pool resource (CPR), we show that when reputational considerations matter and a sufficient level of social stigma affects the violators of a norm, sustainable outcomes are achieved. We find large parameter regions where norm-observing and norm-violating types coexist, and analyze to what extent such coexistence depends on the environment.Cooperation, Social Norm, Ostracism, Common Pool Resource, Evolutionary Game Theory, Replicator Equation, Agent-based Simulation, Coupled Socio-resource Dynamics
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