Constructing Gender in the Economics Lab

Several experimental studies on altruism have found women to be more generous than men. We investigate whether observed gender gaps in generosity can be explained by experimental setting, where some settings are more conducive than others to activating gender identity and social norms. In a dictator game we study priming along two dimensions: 1) some subjects enter their gender on the first page of the questionnaire (Pre) while others enter their gender on the last page (Post) and 2) some subjects are seated in single-sex rooms (Homogeneous) while others are seated in gender-mixed rooms (Mixed). It turns out that gender differences occur (women are more generous than men) only for the combination Pre and Mixed. The effect is driven by males: men are sensitive to priming, while women are not.Gender roles; social norms; altruism; generosity; dictator game; priming

Resource curse or not: A question of appropriability

This paper shows that whether natural resources are good or bad for a country's development depends crucially on the interaction between institutional setting and the type of resources that the country possesses. Some natural resources are for economical and technical reasons more likely to cause problems such as rent-seeking and conflicts than others (termed technically appropriable resources). This potential problem can, however, be countered by good institutional quality (rendering these resources less institutionally appropriable). In contrast to the traditional resource curse hypothesis we show that the impact of natural resources on economic growth is non-monotonic in institutional quality. Mineral rich countries are cursed only if they have low quality institutions, while the curse is reversed if institutions are good enough. Using new data we find that this is even more stark for countries rich in diamonds and precious metals.natural resources; appropriability; property rights; institutions; economic growth; development

Unsupervised Learning of Scene Flow

As Computer Vision-powered autonomous systems are increasingly deployed to solve problems in the wild, the case is made for developing visual understanding methods that are robust and flexible. One of the most challenging tasks for this purpose is given by the extraction of scene flow, that is the dense three-dimensional vector field that associates each world point with its corresponding position in the next observed frame, hence describing its three-dimensional motion entirely. The recent addition of a limited amount of ground truth scene flow information to the popular KITTI dataset prompted a renewed interest in the study of techniques for scene flow inference, although the proposed solutions in literature mostly rely on computation-intensive techniques and are characterised by execution times that are not suited for real-time application. In the wake of the recent widespread adoption of Deep Learning techniques to Computer Vision tasks and in light of the convenience of Unsupervised Learning for scenarios in which ground truth collection is difficult and time-consuming, this thesis work proposes the first neural network architecture to be trained in end-to-end fashion for unsupervised scene flow regression from monocular visual data, called Pantaflow. The proposed solution is much faster than currently available state-of-the-art methods and therefore represents a step towards the achievement of real-time scene flow inference

Resource curse or not: A question of appropriability

This paper shows that whether natural resources are good or bad for a country’s development crucially depends on the interaction between institutional setting and the type of resources possessed by the country. Some natural resources are, for economical and technical reasons, more likely to cause problems such as rent-seeking and conflicts than others. This potential problem can, however, be countered by good institutional quality. In contrast to the traditional resource curse hypothesis, we show the impact of natural resources on economic growth to be non-monotonic in institutional quality. Countries rich in minerals are cursed only if they have low quality institutions, while the curse is reversed if institutions are sufficiently good.Natural Resources, Appropriability, Property Rights, Institutions, Economic Growth, Development

The impact of gender stereotypes on economic growth

This paper argues that gender-specific educational choices have macroeconomic consequences in terms of economic growth. The presence of a social norm affecting persons choosing gender atypical educations at the university level generates a suboptimal allocation of ability, which lowers technological change and the stock of human capital, and thus hurts growth. The analysis of a cross-section of 88 countries over the period 1970 to 1998 lends empirical support for the importance of the educational gender stereotypes for economics growth.economic growth; ability; higher education; gender-specific educational choices; social norms

Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from Coauthorship Patterns

We investigate if voluntary team formation is gender neutral. To this end, we model team formation as a random matching process influenced by the agents' preferences for team size and gender composition and derive how team formation depends on the gender ratio in the population of prospective team mates. We then test if the coauthorship pattern in articles published 1991-2002 in three top Economics journals is gender neutral, exploiting the variation in female presence across subfields of Economics. Our main finding is that gender sorting in coauthorship increases in the presence of women. In particular, we find that the gender gap in the propensity to coauthor with a woman increases in the presence of women in the subfield. We also find that women single author significantly more than men. These findings allow us to reject gender neutrality in team formation.Team Formation; Gender Sorting; Coauthorship Patterns

Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from coauthorship patterns.

We model the formation of teams as a random matching process influenced by the agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We test hypotheses regarding gender and team preferences on the patterns of coauthorship in articles published 1991-2002 in three top economic journals. We find that the female/male gap in the probability of having a female coauthor increases with the proportion of female authorships in the field. This, together increases with the finding that women single author significantly more than men and that female single authorship declines more than male ditto as the share of women increases, allows us to reject gender neutrality in team formation in favour of an hypothesis stating that the fraction of individuals who prefer teaming up with their own sex is larger that the fraction who prefer the opposite sex.team formation; gender preference; segregation; coauthorship patterns

Expression of the 70 kDa Heat shock protein family in Alpine freshwater chironomids (Diptera, Chironomidae) under natural conditions.

Chironomidae represent up to 100% of the fauna of Alpine streams. Because they survive stress conditions such as extremely low temperature (annual mean < 4°C), these organisms represent a good organism model to analyze the relationship between adaptations to cold and expression of stress proteins such as the 70 kDa Heat shock protein family. Fourth instar larvae of ten species of cold-stenothermal chironomids (Pseudodiamesa branickii, Diamesa latitarsis, Diamesa laticauda, Diamesa cinerella, Diamesa insignipes, Diamesa zernyi, Diamesa vaillanti, Orthocladius (Orthocladius) frigidus, Orthocladius (Euorthocladius) thienemanni and Paratriclocladius nivalis) were collected in a glacier-fed stream in N.E. Italy at two stations (1300 and 2600 m a.s.l.) and in two seasons (summer 2005 and spring 2006). Immunodetection and quantification of therelative levels of Hsp70 family were performed via Western blotting. Significantly different levels of Hsp70 were detected among species. The highest amounts were recorded in P. nivalis and D. insignipes, the lowest in P. branickii. Within the genus Diamesa, lower levels of Hsp70 were observed in the most cold stenothermal species than in the less cold stenothermal ones. These differences are explained by different autoecology. The results provide information on biochemical strategies of alpine midges to face cold temperatures under natural conditions and new insights into their possible response to global warming