1,721,016 research outputs found
Home Sweet Home: the Effect of Sugar Protectionism on Emigration in Italy, 1876-1913
Full text linkProtectionist policies have often relevant effects at the regional level. This paper analyzes the impact of sugar import duties on emigration in nineteenth century Italy. Both for climatic reasons and the nature of the soil, the cultivation and processing of sugar beets was geographically concentrated. Our theoretical model illustrates how a tariff that favours local producers may affect residents' incentive to migrate abroad. Using a new set historical data, the predictions of the model are tested through quasi-experimental methods which use the exogenous variation in sugar cultivation across areas to estimate the effect of interest. Results show that protectionism reduced the relative incentive to migrate away from sugar-producing areas
Air Pollution during Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes in Italy
Full text linkWe investigate the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on health outcomes at birth in Italy in the 2000s combining information on mother’s residential location from birth certificates with information on PM10 concentrations from air quality monitors. The potential endogeneity deriving from differential pollution exposure is addressed by exploiting as-good-as-random variation in rainfall shocks as an instrumental variable for air pollution concentrations. Our results show that both average levels of PM10 and days above the hazard limit have detrimental effects on birth weight, duration of gestation as well as overall health status at birth. These effects are mainly driven by pollution exposure during the third trimester of pregnancy and further differ in size with respect to the maternal socio-economic status, suggesting that babies born to socially disadvantaged mothers are more vulnerable. Given the non negligible effects of pollution on birth outcomes, further policy efforts are needed to fully protect fetuses from the adverse effects of air pollution and to mitigate the environmental inequality of health at birth
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Essays on applied econometrics
No full textThis dissertation presents three essays on applied econometrics. The first two chapters study
topics in health economics, estimating the effectiveness of Italy’s smoking ban in reducing tobacco
consumption and the effect of residential mobility on birth outcomes. The third chapter re-evaluates
information on global food consumption.
The first chapter is a joint work with Emilia Del Bono and Daniela Vuri. The effectiveness of smoke-free legislations in reducing tobacco consumption is a broadly discussed topic in health economics. Most studies do not find any evidence of a reduction of smoking after bans. Among the international literature, the case of Italy is an exception, where virtually all studies do find a reduced smoking prevalence and consumption after the ban. We show that the latter estimates are biased due to the fact that they do not take into account seasonal differences in smoking behaviour.
Once controlling for seasonal variation in smoking, we find no impact of the smoking ban for the
overall population, being therefore in opposition to the existing literature.
European Union has declared the mobilization of the labour market as a key policy goal. Unlike
many other studies which focus on the impact of geographic mobility on labour market outcomes,
the second chapter analyses its effect on health. Birth weight data from Italian birth certificates
provide objective health indicators to this study. Controlling for mother fixed effects, no effect of
mobility on overall birth outcomes can be estimated. However, depending on the type of the move
and socio-economic status of the mother, effects are found to be strongly heterogeneous.
The third chapter presents a method to improve the information on food consumption patterns
of food balance sheets (FBS). FBS are the single most important data source for national food
supply and utilization. A model based on a cross-entropy measure of information has been developed in order to inform FBS data with data from national household budget surveys. Overall, 51 low and middle income countries are considered. The results provide updated food consumption data for over 40% of the world’s population
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
