1,721,030 research outputs found
Peer and neighborhood effects : Citation analysis using a spatial autoregressive model and pseudo-spatial data
No full textSpatial analysis approaches have been long since adopted in citation studies. For instance, already in the early eighties, two works relied on input-output matrices to delve into citation transactions among journals (Noma, 1982; Price, 1981). However, the techniques meant to analyze spatial data have evolved since then, experiencing a major step change starting from the turn of the century or so. Here I aim to show that citation analysis may benefit from the development and latest improvements of spatial data analysis, primarily by borrowing the spatial autoregressive models commonly used to identify the occurrence of the so-called peer and neighborhood effects. I discuss features and potentialities of the suggested method using an Italian narrow academic sector as a test bed. The approach proves itself useful for identifying possible citation behavior and patterns. Especially, I delve into the relationships between citation frequency at author level and years of activity, references, references used by the closest peers, self-citations, number of co-authors, conference papers, and conference papers authored by the nearby researchers
The alleged citation advantage of video abstracts may be a matter of self-citations and self-selection bias : comment on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts” by Zong et al
No full textThe paper authored by Zong et al. (Scientometrics, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03108-w) claims that equipping articles with a video abstract provides them a citation advantage. Here I argue that the study above does not consider two potential confounding factors, namely, the role played by self-citations as well as by the self-selection bias. Author self-citations push the citation premium of the articles analyzed in the study referenced above, thus the net effect of video abstracts is lower than expected. What is more, articles with a video abstract seem to associate with higher citations in comparison to their counterparts without the video companion due to the self-selection bias. Namely, authors may be prone to include a video abstract in the articles they believe are of outstanding quality and best representative of their research activities. All this suggests that the alleged citation advantage of video abstracts is, at least, of doubtful occurrence
Economic viability of building energy efficiency measures: a review on the discount rate
Full text linkHow does the issue of the discount rate intersect the research on building energy efficiency and the topics into which it has branched? This contribution tries to answer the previous question through a comprehensive review of related studies. Those studies usually rely on two alternative assumptions. The first refers, explicitly or implicitly, to the notion of cost of capital and, hence, to the position of private stakeholders involved in the decision processes focusing on the adoption of energy-efficient measures in buildings. The second assumption relates to the notion of the social discount rate, which is meant to pursue intergenerational equity and environmental sustainability. As far as the results are concerned, the literature agrees that the discount rate is among the key parameters—possibly the most prominent—affecting the evaluation. However, despite the crucial role it plays, its calculation seldom relies on acknowledged methods and models. Furthermore, data sources sometimes lack consistency and accuracy. Some guidance and suggestions are provided as to the improvement of the discount rate estimation
Driver delle trasformazioni urbane nelle città italiane. Contesto territoriale e partenariato pubblico-privato. Evidenze empiriche da una analisi di rough set
No full textI progetti urbani avviati in Italia e solo in misura ridotta realizzati, hanno in gran parte seguito gli orientamenti programmatici e normativi assunti dalla Comunità Europea ed hanno tenuto conto delle numerosissime esperienze di molti degli stati aderenti. Uno degli orientament(fondamentali che hanno ispirato la formazione e la realizzazione dei progetti è che nella trasformazione urbana, la qualità del cambiamento sia frutto, in misura determinante, della capacità del settore pubblico e di quello privato -ciascuno di essi articolato in una pluralità di soggetti- di interagire e di stabilire forme cooperati·ve capaci di produrre dei vantaggi competitivi per la città. Nella situazione italiana, in manrnnza di un inquadramento legislativo generale e di un sostegno di un quadro normativo e procedurale certo, queste esperienze sono state soggette ad aspre polemiche politiche fino a produrre anche risvolti giudiziari. Certamente se in alcune situazioni, com'è possibile ed anzi probabile, vi siano stati casi di mancanza di trasparenza, di episodi di collusione, quando non di vero e proprio malaffare, si profila il rischio che in Italia, pur al cospetto della positività di gran parte delle esperienze Europee e, soprattutto, del successo di molte nazionali, la concezione dell'urbanistica regredisca in una rigida impostazione vincolistica e l'abilitazione dei progetti a meri criteri di conforrnit.à normativa. La ricerca qui illustrata da Copiello ha il merito di proporre e sperimentare strumenti che al di là di questioni oggetto di indagini della magistratura, si rivelino capaci di valutare l'effettivo esito di esperienze in particolare per quanto attiene al rapporto pubblico privato. Nella ricerca svolta la validità dell'ipotesi formulata è stata testata attraverso l'analisi di quindici casi di studio ritenuti rappresentativi della situazione nazionale, ponendo sotto osservazione interventi di trasformazione e riqualificazione urbana attuctlmente attuati o in corso di attuazione. A questo scopo, in primo luogo, sono state individuate le caratteristiche che hanno svolto un ruolo rilevante nella configurazione degli esiti degli interventi di trasformazione della città e dei risultati fin qui conseguiti. In particolare nella ricerca sono state prese in considerazione l'autorevolezza e la capacità di negoziazione della Pubblica Amministrazione locale, la natura della collaborazione tra i diversi soggetti pubblici coinvolti, la disponibilità dei soggetti privati ad attivare forme di partenariato con il settore pubblico, le modalità e percorsi di coinvolgimento dei soggetti privati attraverso l'attivazione di concorsi e processi di negoziazione
Economic implications of the energy issue: Evidence for a positive non-linear relation between embodied energy and construction cost
No full textThe commitment toward energy efficiency has been taken seriously in several manufacturing sectors,specifically in the building industry. By the end of the seventies and during the early eighties, the research tackled the topic of the energy embodied in commodities and goods, the construction materials as well.In the last few years, embodied energy (EE) has gone back to be a prominent research field, due to the growing awareness that the energy initially used to produce goods and services might prevail in determining the whole amount of life-cycle energy. This is not at all surprising considering high-performance buildings as the passive houses.Here we show that the EE level of several materials is already summarized by well-known and widely available parameters, namely their production costs or market prices. The ability to explain the EE level,through market data arising from production processes, sharply increases by dividing the building materials into clusters, according to their reference industry. The results show a logarithmic relation between EE and cost. Once the EE exceeds a certain threshold the cost increases more than proportionally. Therefore, the will to make rational consumption and production decisions entails the need to consider the energy-to-cost ratio
Urban renewal projects: detecting optimal public-to-private benefit ratio through Discounted Cash Flow Analysis
No full textDuring the past quarter century, urban renewal programs have been carried out ever more frequently under the umbrella of Public-Private Partnerships. A considerable widespread of collaboration forms between public bodies and entrepreneurial entities has occurred; hence, agreements, mixed equity companies, and concession-based project finance contracts have been intensely used in order to develop transactions concerning recovery, renewal and regeneration of urban fabrics. Negotiating public-private agreements, while pursuing sustainability objectives, entails the need to compare the yield expected by private stakeholders with the communities’ requirements. In accordance with the research branch investigating the meaning of sustainability within the built environment, this study aims to discuss the potential of an evaluation approach based on Discounted Cash Flow analysis, in order to detect the optimal public-to-private benefit ratio. A case study analysis is performed upon two ongoing urban renewal transactions in Italy. The approach discussed here allows identifying the value of additional burdens, in the form of public works, that private partners may be asked to pay for in behalf of the communities. Therefore, it gives a valuable support in searching for an appropriate and satisfactory overall balance between the developers’ fair market profit and the communities’ expected benefits
Building energy efficiency: A research branch made of paradoxes
No full textThe literature dealing with building energy efficiency has long since debated about the possible occurrence of the so-called Jevons’ paradox. In a nutshell, benefiting from energy savings due to transition to high-performance buildings, may the same savings cause a kind of rebound effect, by acting as an incentive to increase consumptions? On closer inspection, this is not the only paradox affecting the research branch that focuses on the energy used by the buildings and the building industry. A second paradox is that investments in energy-efficient solutions may contribute to energy price control, which in turn lends itself to make the same investments not profitable. A third paradox lies in the need to adopt energy-intensive materials in order to achieve substantial energy savings in operation; hence, sometimes, we just substitute a certain amount of operating energy with a more or less commensurate amount of embodied energy. Here we argue that the joint consideration of the paradoxes mentioned above should not be neglected since it brings with itself several implications needing to be disentangled, whether we aim to get further enhancements in this disciplinary field
A Discounted Cash Flow variant to detect the optimal amount of additional burdens in Public-Private Partnership transactions
Full text linkThe Discounted Cash Flow method is a long since well-known tool to assess the feasibility of investment projects, as the background which shapes a broad range of techniques, from the Cost-Benefit Analysis up to the Life-Cycle Cost Analysis. Its rationale lies in the comparison of deferred values, only once they have been discounted back to the present. The DCF variant proposed here fits into a specific application field. It is well-suited to the evaluations required in order to structure equitable transactions under the umbrella of Public-Private Partnership. •The discount rate relies upon the concept of expected return on equity, instead than on those of weighted average cost of capital, although the latter is the most common reference within the scope of real estate investment valuation.•Given a feasible project, whose Net Present Value is more than satisfactory, we aim to identify the amount of the additional burdens that could be charged to the project, under the condition of keeping the same economically viable.•The DCF variant essentially deals with an optimization problem, which can be solved by means of simple one-shot equations, derived from financial mathematics, or through iterative calculations if additional constraints must be considered
The open access citation premium may depend on the openness and inclusiveness of the indexing database, but the relationship is controversial because it is ambiguous where the open access boundary lies
No full textDo open access (OA) documents benefit from a citation premium in comparison to traditional subscription-based articles? The question has been debated during the last two decades, as OA is gaining momentum and becoming an ever more established option. Without coming to a shared position, the literature on the topic has essentially split into two clusters: on the one hand, the studies that endorse the occurrence of an OA citation advantage; on the other hand, the works suggesting that it has a negligible extent, or is due to other confounding factors. The primary aim of this study is not to bring new evidence in favor or against the citation premium supposedly characterizing OA articles. Instead, this work is meant to test a specific hypothesis connected with the OA citation advantage, namely, that OA papers may benefit from higher citations in open indexing databases (e.g., Google Scholar) rather than in selective indexing engines (i.e., Scopus and Web of Science). The empirical findings, although conflicting, show that the hypothesis above is not misplaced since a few confirmatory results are achieved. However, the hypothesized relationship remains controversial, also because of an uncertain boundary between OA and paywall articles
Achieving affordable housing through energy efficiency strategy
No full textCooperation between public and private sector has achieved a remarkable widespread, in the Italian context, over the last two decades. Nevertheless, the increasing difficulty in accessing the capital market and the rising cost of funding sources, both noticeable over the past few years, led to a slowdown of Public–Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives. Meanwhile, the community is expressing new needs to be satisfied, such as the conversion of brownfields, the recovery of housing stock dating back to former times, as well as the refurbishment of public offices or schools. Emerging priorities include the supply of affordable dwellings for low to medium income households.
This essay aims to examine a case study in which PPP and buildings energy efficiency have been successfully combined, in order to jointly contribute to the achievement of a social housing settlement.
Thanks to energy efficiency measures—concerning building envelope insulation, heating system and other installations—the agreed rent results far higher than social rent of protected tenancies, and furthermore above the range of fair rents characterising other regulated tenancies, but mildly lower than market rents. All this allows to achieve an equity yield rate satisfying from the perspective of a venture philanthropy investment
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