1,721,051 research outputs found
Who (Can) Tap the Crowd: On The characteristics of Start-Ups Accessing Equity Crowdfunding in Italy
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Convergence des structures productives et synchronisation des cycles industriels dans l'Union européenne
No full textEvaluation of the effectiveness of N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) and N-acetylcysteine-cyclodextrins Multi-Composite in Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm formation
No full textPseudomonas aeruginosa is a gram-negative bacillus involved in biofilm production in several lung diseases. In this study, the in vitro anti-biofilm effect of both N-acetylcysteine (NAC)-a well-known antioxidant compound and GSH prodrug-and NACESOLTM-a new multicomposite based on NAC, resveratrol, and cyclodextrins-was investigated by evaluation of reduction of bacterial colonies growth. Physico-chemical analysis of NACESOLTM was performed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, and X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) techniques. The anti-biofilm activity of NAC and NACESOLTM, expressed as percentage of biofilm reduction, revealed an increased biological activity of multicomposite at low concentrations. Furthermore, the NAC activity against P. aeruginosa biofilm was also studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) joined to the energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) technique, which is able to evaluate the reduction of sulfur element on biofilm surface. The use of SEM-EDS highlights the biofilm amount decrease with increasing NAC concentration. This work permitted us to highlight the minimum concentration of NAC able to interact in the P. aeruginosa biofilm formation process and the promising use of a new composite based on NAC and cyclodextrins
E pluribus, quaedam. Gross Domestic Product out of a Dashboard of Indicators
Full text linkIs aggregate income enough to summarize well-being? We address this long-standing question by exploiting a quantitative approach that studies the relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and a set of economic, social and environmental indicators for nine developed economies. We introduce a mathematical approach to the analysis of economic indicators. By employing dimensionality reduction and time series reconstruction techniques, we quantify the share of variability stemming from a large set of different indicators that can be compressed into a univariate index. We also evaluate how well this variability can be explained if the univariate index is assumed to be respectively the gross domestic product, national income, household income, or household spending. Our results indicate that all the four univariate measures are doomed to fail in accounting for the variability of all the domains. Even if GDP emerges as the best option among the four economic variables, its quality in synthesizing the variability of indicators belonging to other domains is poor (about 35%). Our approach provides additional support for policy makers interested in measuring the trade offs between income and other relevant social, health and ecological dimensions. Finally, our work adds new quantitative evidence to the vast literature criticizing the usage of GDP as a measure of well-being
Governance structure, technical change, and industry competition
No full textWe develop a model to study the impact of corporate governance on the investment decisions of firms and competition in an industry populated by publicly owned firms. A bargaining process between firm's stakeholders determines the optimal allocation of financial resources between real investments in R&D and financial investments in shares buybacks. We characterize the relation between governance and investment strategy and we study how different governance structures shape technical progress and competition over the industrial life cycle. Numerical simulations of a calibrated set-up of the model show that pooling together industries characterized by heterogeneous governance structures generate the well-documented inverted-U shaped relation between competition and innovation
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