Firing at Subcontractors? Spillover Employment Effects of Offshoring in Italy

Using firm-level data for Italy, we address the employment consequences of international production offshoring. We concur with previous literature that offshoring firms’ individual employment performances are no worse than at matching non-offshoring firms. However, offshoring might impart negative spillover effects on subcontracting firms, and this indirect effect might be felt particularly in Italy’s industrial structure (small-sized networked enterprises). To study this, we group firms within their typical subcontracting clusters, identify high offshoring clusters and compare them with a matching low offshoring sample. The evidence that employment performances worsen in the productive clusters with high offshoring supports our conjecture.International outsourcing, multinational firms, employment effects, propensity

Maecenas between apologies and anthologies: Past scholarship and new researches

Maecenas’ character has been handed down variously and sometimes contradictorily by ancient sources; modern critics have contributed even more to stress extravagant features of his personality and writings. This paper aims to highlight the most important ways of interpretation and to suggest new hints of research starting from a re-analysis of texts

Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di richerca archeologica. Atti del II workshop (Genova, 11 maggio 2007)

IOSA is a working group that has been often called a project, started in 2004 within grupporicerche, with the aim of evaluating if and how free and open source software could be used in everyday archaeological practice. The activity of IOSA has been going through several phases, from the initial cataloguing of software programs on the http://www.iosa.it/ website, to the development of dedicated software tools, advanced documentation and the involvement in international initiatives. In 2007 IOSA was in a moment of passage between the first “explorative” phase and the following phase, with the first applications in our respective fields of studies, some experiments in programming with high-level languages (Python), the management of web-based information systems and the never ending cataloguing of cultural heritage. The 2007 workshop is to date the only one organised by neither a university nor another public institution. Together with the 2008 meeting, this workshop has been the only one not organised by employed staff. Although this exceptional situation is no justification, it is useful to understand both the delay of this publication and the great freedom we enjoyed in making choices on our own. This book presents the fruits of our researches and collaborations realised at the 2007 workshop

A percolation transition in Yang-Mills matter at finite number of colours

We examine baryonic matter at quark chemical potential of the order of the confinement scale, \mu_q\sim \lqcd. In this regime, quarks are supposed to be confined but baryons are close to the ``tightly packed limit'' where they nearly overlap in configuration space. We show that this system will exhibit a percolation phase transition {\em when varied in the number of colours} $N_c$: at high $N_c$, large distance correlations at quark level are possible even if the quarks are essentially confined. At low $N_c$, this does not happen. We discuss the relevance of this for dense nuclear matter, and argue that our results suggest a new ``phase transition'', varying $N_c$ at constant $\mu_q$.Comment: Accepted for publication, Physical Review Letters. Title changed from original, "Quarkyonic percolation at finite number of colors", at the request of the edito

Excava(c)tion in Vignale. Archaeology on stage, archaeology on the Web

As an orchestra or a rock star, archaeologists have their audience too. This paper wants to highlight an integrated approach between fieldwork, its account and its dissemination to the public in different ways, including social media. This potential integration has come to life in the 2011 excavation of the Roman mansio of Vignale (Italy) and it has been named “Excava(c)tion”. It doesn’t mean a new way of digging but another way of approaching the excavation, an approach integrated toward and with the public, both on site and on the social Web. “Excava(c)tion” conceives the site as a stage and digging as a performance, through a continuous dialogue between archaeologists and the public. Archaeologists share their work in the form of guided tours (live, theatrical-like performances), communicative diaries and videos (edited, motion-picture performances) and on a blog (www.uominiecoseavignale.it). They receive back comments and oral accounts from the local community about the main themes of common interest. “Excava(c)tion” means engagement both of archaeologists and the public in the pursuit of a global multivocality during archaeological excavation

How Wood Fuels\u2019 Quality Relates to the Standards: A Class-Modelling Approach

The quality requirements of wood biofuels are regulated by a series of harmonized international standards. These standards define the technical parameter limits that influence the quality of solid biomass as a fuel. In 2014 the European reference standard for solid biofuel was replaced by the International ISO standard. In the case of wood chips, the main difference between the European and International standards is the definition of particle size distribution classes. In this context, this study analyses the quality of wood chips and its variation over the years according to the \u201cformer\u201d (EN 14691-4) and \u201cin force\u201d (ISO 17225-4) standards. A Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) model was built to predict the best quality of wood chips and to clarify the relationship between quality and standard parameters, time and changes in the standard regulations. The results show that, compared to the EN standards, classification with the ISO standards increases the samples belonging to the best quality classes and decreases the not classified samples. Furthermore, all the SIMCA models have a high sensitivity (>90%), reflect the differences introduced to the quality standards and are therefore suitable for monitoring the quality of wood chips and their changes

Bounds on the Higher Degree Erd\H{o}s-Ginzburg-Ziv Constants over Fqn\mathbb{F}_q^n

The classical Erd\H{o}s-Ginzburg-Ziv constant of a group $G$ denotes the smallest positive integer $\ell$ such that any sequence $S$ of length at least $\ell$ contains a zero-sum subsequence of length $\exp(G)$. In a recent paper, Caro and Schmitt generalized this concept, using the $m$-th degree symmetric polynomial $e_m(S)$ instead of the sum of the elements of $S$ and considering subsequences of a given length $t$. In particular, they defined the higher degree Erd\H{o}s-Ginzburg-Ziv constants $EGZ(t,R,m)$ of a finite commutative ring $R$ and presented several lower and upper bounds to these constants. This paper aims to provide lower and upper bounds for $EGZ(t,R,m)$ in case $R=\mathbb{F}_q^{n}$. The lower bounds here presented have been obtained, respectively, using Lov\'asz Local Lemma and the Expurgation method and, for sufficiently large $n$, they beat the lower bound provided by Caro and Schmitt for the same kind of rings. Finally, we prove closed form upper bounds derived from the Ellenberg-Gijswijt and Sauermann results for the cap-set problem assuming that $q = p^k$, $t = p$, and $m=p-1$. Moreover, using the Slice Rank method we derive a convex optimization problem that provides the best bounds for $q = 3^k$, $t = 3$, $m=2$ and $k=2,3,4,5$