170,261 research outputs found

    Smoking, health and ageing

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    Abstract On March 19, 2008 a Symposium on Pathophysiology of Ageing and Age-Related diseases was held in Palermo, Italy. Here, the lecture of V. Nicita-Mauro on Smoking, health and ageing is summarized. Smoking represents an important ageing accelerator, both directly by triggering an inflammatory responses, and indirectly by favoring the occurrence of several diseases where smoking is a recognized risk factor. Hence, non-smokers can delay the appearance of diseases and of ageing process, so attaining longevity.</p

    Trade Policy, Trade Costs, and Developing Country Trade

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    This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade costs. Based on a gravity regression framework, the analysis suggests that tariffs and non-tariff measures continue to be a significant source of trade restrictiveness for low-income countries despite preferential access programs. This is because the value of trade preferences is quite limited: a new measure of the relative preference margin developed in the paper reveals that this is very low for most country-pairs. Most countries with very good (duty-free) access to a market generally have competitors that have the same degree of access. The empirical analysis suggests that measures to improve logistics performance and facilitate trade are likely to have the greatest positive effects in expanding developing country trade, increasing the trade impacts of lowering remaining border barriers by a factor of two or more.Tariffs; nontariff measures; trade facilitation; logistics; economic development; Doha Round

    Virtual vs. Standard Strike: An Experiment

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    In this paper we compare - in the laboratory - stoppage and virtual strike. Our experiment confirms that higher wages offered by an employer lead to considerably more costly effort provision. The number of strikes, the level of efforts and average total payoffs are higher under virtual strike than under standard strike. However, when standard strike is associated with reciprocal externalities, it induces higher effort levels, higher payoffs and an extremely reduced number of strikes than virtual strike. It is unclear whether this behavior re?ects reciprocity or other forms of social preferences. However our results might explain why standard strikes rather than virtual ones are generally adopted by workers.virtual strike, cooperation, reciprocity, fairness, experiments

    Modeling biased technical change: Implications for climate policy

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    Climate-economy models aiming at quantifying the costs and effects of climate change impacts and policies have become important tools for climate policy decision-making. Although there are several important dimensions along which models differ, this paper focuses on a key component of climate change economics and policy, namely technical change. This paper tackles the issues of whether technical change is biased towards the energy sectors, the importance of the elasticity of substitution between factors in determining this bias and how mitigation policy is likely to affect it. The analysis is performed using the World Induced Technical Change model, WITCH. Three different versions of themodel are proposed. The starting set-up includes endogenous technical change only in the energy sector. A second version introduces endogenous technical change in both theenergy and non-energy sectors. A third version of the model embodies different sources of technical change, namely R&D and human capital. Although different formulations ofendogenous technical change have only a minor influence on climate policy costs, the macroeconomic effects on knowledge and human capital formation can vary greatly
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