Health at Work and Low-pay:a European Perspective

This study investigates the relationship between health, working conditions and pay in Europe. In particular, we measure health at work using self-assessed indicators for overall, as well as physical and mental health, using the 2005 wave of the EWCS (European Working Conditions Survey) for 15 EU countries. We find that, controlling for personal characteristics, (adverse) working conditions are associated with poor health status – both physical and mental. Low pay plays a role, mainly for men and when interacted with working conditions, suggesting that stigma and deprivation effects may be correlated with health at work. We also account for the potential endogeneity arising from workers sorting by firms and job types with different working conditions, and provide evidence of a causal effect of (adverse) working conditions and (low) pay on health at the workplace.working conditions, physical and mental health, low-pay employment

Socioeconomic gradient in health: how important is material deprivation?

In this paper we use the Spanish Living Conditions Survey (2005‐2008) to investigate whether there is a socioeconomic gradient in health when alternative measures of socioeconomic status, apart from income, are considered. In particular we construct a material deprivation index that reflects some minimum standards of quality of life, and we analyze its impact on self‐reported health. To address this issue, we use a deprivation index that incorporates comparison effects with societal peers and we estimate health equations using a random effects model. Furthermore, the model is extended to include a Mundlak term that corrects for the potential correlation between the error term and the regressors. Our results reveal that the relationship between health and income operates through comparison information with respect to societal peers. In contrast, material deprivation in terms of financial difficulties, basic necessities and housing conditions exerts a direct effect on individual healt

Adverse Workplace Conditions, High-Involvement Work Practices and Labor Turnover: Evidence from Danish Linked Employer-Employee Data

This paper contributes to the emerging strand of the empirical literature that takes advantage of new data on workplace-specific job attributes and voluntary employee turnover to shed fresh insights on the relationship between employee turnover, adverse workplace conditions and HRM environments. We find evidence that workers in hazardous workplace conditions are indeed more likely to separate from their current employers voluntarily while High-Involvement Work Practices (HIWPs) reduces employee turnover. Specifically, exposing a worker to physical hazards such as loud noise, vibration or poor lighting will lead to a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of turnover from the average turnover rate of 18 percent; working in a fixed night shift will result in an 11 percentage point jump in the turnover probability, and having an unsupportive boss will lead to a 5 percentage point increase. The effect of HIWPs is modest yet hardly negligible with a 4 percentage point reduction in the turnover probability from having voice in the workplace. Furthermore the turnover-increasing effect of physical hazards is found to be significantly reduced by the presence of strong information sharing whereas the adverse effect on turnover of the use of fixed night shift is also found to be significantly mitigated by the authority delegation to workers by management. As such, our evidence lends support to those who advocate the use of HIWPs for those firms with employee turnover problems due to hazardous workplace conditions. Finally, our logit analysis of the 5-year odds of improving workplace conditions suggests that the worker exposed to adverse workplace conditions can improve her long-term odds of rectifying such workplace adversities significantly by separating from the firm voluntarily. Voluntary turnover appears to be a rational worker response to adverse workplace conditions, and unless the firm alleviates its adverse workplace conditions directly or mitigates their effects on voluntary turnover through HIWPs, workers exposed to adverse workplace conditions will likely continue to take the exit option.employee turnover, workplace conditions, human resource management, high-involvement work system, high-performance work system

Chapter La documentazione digitale per la comunicazione del Patrimonio Culturale: il caso dell’Eremo delle Carceri ad Assisi

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Electron mass effects in the prediction of the muon-electron scattering cross sections

Abstract (italiano): Il momento magnetico anomalo del muone, o “g-2” del muone, è una delle grandezze misurate più precisamente in fisica delle particelle e permette di studiare con grande accuratezza la cosiddetta Quantum Field theory (QFT). La discrepanza di lunga data tra il valore sperimentale e quello teorico del momento magnetico anomalo del muone, aμ, ha portato allo studio attento delle correzioni adroniche poiché sono queste quelle che dominano nel risultato dello SM. Qualche anno fa è stato proposto un nuovo approccio per misurare il contributo adronico al “g-2” del muone, aμHLO, misurando il coupling elettromagnetico Δah(q2), per un quadrimomento trasferito di tipo space-like q2=t<0, attraverso dati di scattering. Lo scattering elastico tra muoni ad alta energia e elettroni atomici è stato identificato come il processo ideale per questa misurazione, portando così alla proposta dell’esperimento MUonE al CERN per determinare Δah(q2) dalla sezione d’urto differenziale dello scattering muone-elettrone. Dal punto di vista teorico, per ottenere un risultato compatibile con quello di MUonE, le correzioni alla sezione d’urto differenziale a leading order (LO), next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QED devono essere considerate, insieme a quelle adroniche a NNLO (l’esperimento MUonE si propone di determinare il contributo adronico a NLO). Finora solo le correzioni a NLO in QED sono state calcolare mentre quelle a NNLO in QED, necessarie per raggiungere l’alta precisione richiesta ma MUonE, non si conoscono ancora. Quindi un nuovo metodo per determinare le correzioni a NNLO in QED, basato sull’espansione per regioni, sarebbe auspicabile. In questa tesi vengono studiati i contributi elettromagnetici, elettrodeboli e adronici al momento magnetico del muone. Si passa poi allo studio della sezione d’urto differenziale per lo scattering muone-elettrone a LO e NLO. Qui le divergenze ultraviolette sono regolarizzate in dimensional regularization e i risultati UV-finiti sono ottenuti nel cosidetto on-shell renormalization scheme. Inoltre il contributo di soft-Bremsstrahlung è introdotto per risolvere le divergenze IR. Infine viene applicato il metodo di espansione per regioni all’ampiezza per lo scattering muone-elettrone in QED a NLO confrontando il risultato con l’espansione di Taylor della sezione d’urto differenziale per lo scattering muone-elettrone. Abstract (inglese): The muon anomalous magnetic moment, or muon “g-2”, is one of the most precisely measured quantities in particle physics and allows to test Quantum Field Theory (QFT) in its depth, with unprecedented accuracy. The long-standing discrepancy between the experimental and the SM prediction of the muon anomalous magnetic moment, aμ, has kept the hadronic corrections under close scrutiny for several years. In fact, the hadronic uncertainty dominates that of the SM value and is comparable with the experimental one. A few years ago a new approach has been proposed to determine the leading hadronic contribution to the muon “g-2”, aμHLO, measuring the effective electromagnetic coupling Δah(q2), for space-like squared four-momentum transfers q2=t<0, via scattering data. The elastic scattering of high-energy muons on atomic electrons has been identified as an ideal process for this measurement, leading to the proposal of the MUonE experiment at CERN to extract Δah(q2) from the muon-electron scattering differential cross section. On the theory side, in order to obtain a theoretical result which can be compared with the one measured at MUonE, leading order (LO), next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QED corrections to the differential cross section have to be considered, together with the hadronic ones a NNLO (the determination of the hadronic NLO contribution is the goal of the MUonE experiment). Up to now, only the NLO QED corrections to the differential cross section were computed. The QED corrections at NNLO, crucial to interpret the high precision data of future experiment like MuonE, are not yet known. A new method to compute the QED NNLO correction, based on the expansion by regions approach, would be desirable. In this thesis project it is studied the QED, electroweak and hadronic contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Then it is analyzed the muon-electron scattering differential cross section at LO and NLO. Ultraviolet singularities will be regularized via conventional dimensional regularization and UV-finite results are obtained in the on-shell renormalization scheme. Moreover the soft-Bremsstrahlung contribution is introduced to take care of the infrared divergences. Finally the expansion by regions method is applied to the amplitude for the muon-electron scattering at NLO QED and the result is compared with the Taylor expansion of the exact result for the muon-electron scattering differential cross section

After-effects of responding to activated and deactivated prospective memory target events differ depending on processing overlaps

Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In three experiments with undergraduate student participants (N = 226), in which cue focality was manipulated as a function of processing overlaps, we investigated the after-effects of activated and deactivated prospective memory target events. We predicted that lower focality results in stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but to weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. In contrast, we predicted that higher focality results in weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but to stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. For activated prospective memory, the pattern of results conformed to the expectations. For deactivated prospective memory, after-effects occurred only under high process overlap situations in a zero-target condition, in which participants were instructed for the prospective memory task, but never had the opportunity to perform it, indicating the special representational status of uncompleted intentions. We discuss these findings within the process overlap framework, which allows more fine-grained distinctions than the focal versus non-focal dichotomy

Evidence based education and special education: a possible dialogue

This article presents a critical analysis of the concept of evidence-based practice, promoting a dialogue with special education. It provides a theoretical and methodological framework (Evidence Based Education - EBE) on the research methodologies within the EBE approach, the definition of an EBE model in special education, the research analysis on school integration in Italy in an EBE perspective and the identification of research lines to validate the practices of inclusive education.In conclusion, although there are methodological and practical difficulties in leading an empirical research in the inclusion field, according to EBE parameters, it is possible to consider other models of research, as such as the methodology on the single subject and observation research for further in depth analysis

Is it the Way You Live or the Job You Have? Health Effects of Lifestyles and Working Conditions

This paper investigates the role of lifestyles (smoking, drinking and obesity) and working conditions (physical hazards, no support from colleagues, job worries and repetitive work) on health. Three alternative systems of simultaneous multivariate probit equations are estimated, one for each health measure: an indicator of selfassessed health, an indicator of physical health, and an indicator of work-related mental health problems, using Danish data for 2000 and 2005. We find that while lifestyles are significant determinants of self-assessed health, they play a minor role for our indicators of physical health and mental health. The effect of lifestyles seems to be dominated by the effect of adverse working conditions, which significantly worsen health. This result is robust for all health dimensions considered

Youth prospects in a time of economic recession

Background: The paper gives an update to earlier analysis considering youth poverty and transition to adulthood, which is timely given the economic crisis engulfing many countries in Europe. Whereas the crisis is affecting young people in particular, there is also a certain degree of variation across Europe. Objective: We document the short-term consequences of the current recession on the transition to adulthood of young Europeans, focusing on two main cornerstones in the transition to adulthood: economic independence and residential autonomy. Methods: We use a combination of OECD Employment Statistics for 2012 and micro-level data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the period 2005-2011 for 24 countries. Results: We document an increase in economic hardship experienced by young adults in several European countries during the recession, which is starting to translate into higher rates of co-residence with parents, hence delaying the process of leaving home and gaining economic independence. Conclusions: The way countries are reacting to the recession is not yet clear-cut, but economic uncertainty and deprivation is on the rise in those countries hardest hit, which is likely to delay the key markers of transition to adulthood