Broadband Internet and Social Capital

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance of the dwelling from the specific node of the network serving its area. Merging unique information about the topology of the voice network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital, we show that access to broadband Internet caused a significant decline in forms of offline interaction and civic engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration substantially crowded out several aspects of social capital.Comment: Internet & Society; Economic

The University of Bologna career guidance project: bridging secondary schools and university with the e-learning experience

The University of Bologna has started the Career Guidance Project developing several initiatives: self evaluation questionnaires for Secondary Schools students, training courses for admission tests, and an e-learning platform with online modules in order to explain and show the cultural and professional environment of the University. It will be explained the genesis of the Project, the choice of the Learning Management System, the authoring tool advantages and the practical modules implementation. Special attention will be devoted to the analysis of the relationship with Professors and Authors during the modules preparation: the course deployment has been an opportunity not only to explain which are the basic aspects of e-learning effectiveness, but also to stress the importance of pedagogical aspects of a well structured course. The modules have been offered to several Secondary Schools in a pilot edition in Spring 2007. Now there are ten modules available: Industrial Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Medicine and Nursing, Foreign Languages, Arts and Humanities, Psychology, Statistics, Law, Sciences. A new development of the Project will offer to the Erasmus students the possibility to use the e-learning modules to approach the University of Bologna and the preferred Faculty

Intercultural comics : an expresson of the african voice

La necesidad de una educación intercultural es cada día más evidente y necesaria en un universo comunicado e interdependiente. Sin embargo, las tecnologías no van siempre al compás de las evolución de las culturas y los modelos de vivir y sentir de las comunidades. Por ello, se hace necesario el desarrollo de propuestas didácticas interculturales, a través de los propios medios de comunicación, con el objeto de dotar a niños y adolescentes de los instrumentos necesarios para saber decodificar y reconocer los estereotipos que suelen acompañar la representación de determinadas culturas.The need for intercultural education is growing more evident in an increasingly communicative and interdependent. However, technologies do not always ma- tch the evolution of the diverse cultures and communities and their models for living and feeling. Thus, it becomes necessary to develop intercultural educative projects for the media in order to provide children and teenagers with the necessary tools that help them decode and recognise the many stereotypes usually accompanying the representation of those culture

The fight against cartels: a transatlantic perspective

The fight against cartels is a priority for antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. What differs between the EU and the US is not the basic toolkit for achieving deterrence, but to whom it is targeted. In the EU, pecuniary sanctions against the firm are the only instruments available to the Commission, while in the US criminal sanctions are also widely employed. The aim of this paper is to compare two different types of fines levied on managerial firms when they collude. We consider a profit based fine as opposed to a delegation based fine, with the latter targeting the manager in a more direct way. Under the assumption of revenue equivalence, we find that the delegation based fine, although distortive, is more effective in deterring cartels than the profit based one. When evaluating social welfare, a trade-off between deterrence and output distortion can arise. However, if the antitrust authority focuses on consumer surplus, then the delegation based fine is to be preferred

What ever happened to social capital in the internet era?

You are finally at home after a busy day at work. An invitation to join friends watching the latest episode of the Avengers saga at the cinema pops up on your smartphone. You are tired, and you already planned to spend a relaxing night at home, ordering pizza through Deliveroo, listening to your favourite music with Spotify and watching that addictive tv series on Netflix. Why ruin such a wonderful plan by going out with friends? Now, imagine you just moved to a new apartment and did not have the time to install a broadband connection at home. Your friends’ invitation suddenly becomes more attractive. Does the time we spend online displace our offline relationships? Does this possible displacement effect extend to civic engagement and political participation? Is the Internet weakening our social ties making us less connected than before

Minimum wage and tolerance for high incomes

We suggest that stabilizing the baseline income can make low-wage workers more tolerant towards high income earners. We present evidence of this attitude in the UK by exploiting the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW), which institutionally sets a baseline pay reducing the risk of income losses and providing a clear reference point for British workers at the lower end of the income distribution. Based on data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we show that workers who benefited from the NMW program became relatively more tolerant of high incomes and more likely to support and vote for the Conservative Party. As far as tolerance for high incomes is related to tolerance of inequality, our results may suggest that people advocate for equality also because they fear income losses below a given reference point

The price effects of prohibiting price parity clauses: evidence from international hotel groups

Dominant platforms such as Booking.com and Amazon often impose Price Parity Clauses to prevent sellers from charging lower prices on alternative sales channels. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the removal of these price restrictions in France in 2015 for three major international hotel groups. First, our analyses reveal limited and non-significant price effects for rooms sold through channels visible to consumers, such as the hotels' websites or Online Travel Agencies. Second, we document a significant price reduction on sales channels not visible to consumers, such as the hotels' direct offline channel. Third, we identify a significant shift in sales share from online travel agencies to the hotels' direct offline channel

Hot-Carrier Degradation in Power LDMOS: Selective LOCOS-Versus STI-Based Architecture

In this paper, we present an analysis of the degradation induced by hot-carrier stress in new generation power lateral double-diffused MOS (LDMOS) transistors. Two architectures with the same nominal voltage and comparable performance featuring a selective LOCOS and a shallow-trench isolation are investigated by means of constant voltage stress measurements and TCAD simulations. In particular, the on-resistance degradation in linear regime is experimentally extracted and numerically reproduced under different stress conditions. A similar amount of degradation has been reached by the two architectures, although different physical mechanisms contribute to the creation of the interface states. By using a recently developed physics-based degradation model, it has been possible to distinguish the damage due to collisions of single high-energetic electrons (single-particle events) and the contribution of colder electrons impinging on the silicon/oxide interface (multiple-particle events). A clear dominance of the single-electron collisions has been found in the case of LOCOS structure, whereas the multiple-particle effect plays a clear role in STI-based device at larger gate-voltage stress