J curve for abatement with transboundary pollution

In this note an alternative framework to Selden and Song's (1995) work is proposed in order to clarify some of their results and verify whether the relationship between pollution abatement and national income can be drawn as a J curve when there is more than one country involved. As Selden and Song do, pollution is considered as a flow externality. Their model is extended to a two country case which requires the use of differential games. The optimisation problem is decomposed into two stages, the pollution abatement and the accumulation problem. A J curve for pollution abatement is replicated and a static comparative analysis confirms that the smaller the rate of discount and/or the less polluting a technology is, the higher the stock of capital, current expenditure and pollution abatement will be at the steady state.differential games

Bioeconomics of Sustainable Harvest of Competing Species: A Comment

We refer to Flaaten’s (JEEM 1991, pp. 163–80) study on competing species. In Theorem 5 (Theorem 6), Flaaten claims that a higher price (harvesting costs) of one species yields a lower (greater) own stock-size and a greater (lower) stock-size of the competing species in the steady state. It is shown that both claims are wrong.Renewable resources, fishery management, multiple species model, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, D62, D99, Q22,

The sustainability of start-up firms among formerly wage workers

In this paper we analyse the survival of start-up firms among formerly wage workers in Spain. In particular, we address the question of how long do these workers remain self-employed before entering into unemployment or returning to a new paid-employment, using well-known duration model techniques. Results show that a higher survival rate in self-employment is associated to men, prime-age workers and individuals with higher previous labour turnover. Moreover, longer unemployment spells are found to speed up the rate of transition to non-employment and to reduce that to paid employment. Finally, the probability of exiting decreases with duration in self-employment.Self-employment, Duration analysis

External referencing and pharmaceutical price negociation.

External referencing (ER) imposes a price cap for pharmaceuticals, based on prices of identical or comparable products in foreign countries. Suppose a foreign country (F) negotiates prices with a pharmaceutical firm, whereas a home country (H) can either negotiate prices independently or implement ER, based on the foreign price. We show that country H prefers ER if copayments in H are relatively high. This preference is reinforced when H's population is small. Irrespective of relative country sizes, ER by country H harms country F. Our model is inspired by the wide European experience with this cost-containment policy. Namely, in Europe, drug authorization and price negotiations are carried out by separate agencies. We confirm our main results in two extensions. The first one allows for therapeutic competition between drugs. In the second one, drug authorization and price negotiation take place in a single agency.pharmaceuticals; external referencing; price negotiation;

Reduced structural connectivity between left auditory thalamus and the motion-sensitive planum temporale in developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by the inability to acquire typical reading and writing skills. Dyslexia has been frequently linked to cerebral cortex alterations; however recent evidence also points towards sensory thalamus dysfunctions: dyslexics showed reduced responses in the left auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body, MGB) during speech processing in contrast to neurotypical readers. In addition, in the visual modality, dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left visual thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus, LGN) and V5/MT, a cerebral cortex region involved in visual movement processing. Higher LGN-V5/MT connectivity in dyslexics was associated with the faster rapid naming of letters and numbers (RANln), a measure that is highly correlated with reading proficiency. We here tested two hypotheses that were directly derived from these previous findings. First, we tested the hypothesis that dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the auditory motion-sensitive part of the left planum temporale (mPT). Second, we hypothesized that the amount of left mPT-MGB connectivity correlates with dyslexics RANln scores. Using diffusion tensor imaging based probabilistic tracking we show that male adults with developmental dyslexia have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the left mPT, confirming the first hypothesis. Stronger left mPT-MGB connectivity was not associated with faster RANnl scores in dyslexics, but in neurotypical readers. Our findings provide first evidence that reduced cortico-thalamic connectivity in the auditory modality is a feature of developmental dyslexia, and that it may also impact on reading related cognitive abilities in neurotypical readers

Unweaving the Phisher\u27s Net: An Exploratory Study

Over 29,000 phishing emails are reported each month on average to the AntiPhishing Working Group. If we consider that at least 5% of these emails achieve their target, at least 1,450 distinct email users a month are caught in the phisher’s net. This study attempts to understand the basic deception techniques utilized by phishers when creating the phishing emails. Exploratory content and linguistic analyses are performed to elicit the most widely used deception techniques and linguistic features that seem to be prominent in phishing emails. Preliminary results provide evidence to support that phishers utilize a very reduced and recognizable subset of deception techniques. Moreover, paired with these deception techniques, specific linguistic features seem to create a recognizable pattern of phishing emails that can be used to aid detection and filtering

"El \uabPinocho\ubb de Salvador Mestres (Barcelona, 194-)".

In questo articolo si presenta l'analisi di un adattamento spagnolo di \u201cLe avventure di Pinocchio\u201d, realizzato negli anni '40 dall\u2019illustratore Salvador Mestres per la casa editrice Bruguera di Barcellona. L'analisi inizia con una revisione delle traduzioni e adattamenti spagnoli dell\u2019opera, segue con la presentazione della figura di Mestres e si conclude con l'analisi della sua versione: si identificano i cambiamenti nella macrostruttura del testo originale; si stabiliscono i parallelismi e differenze con la versione originale e la versione cinematografica della Disney; e si analizzano i processi di adattamento alla lingua e alla cultura di arrivo