Rule of law and the Environmental Kuznets Curve: evidence for carbon emissions

In response to recently growing literature investigating the relationship between environment and institutions, this study investigates how rule of law influences the level of income at the turning point of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Using an alternative specification of EKC that avoids nonlinear transformation of potentially nonstationary regressors, investigated by Bradford et al. (2005) and Leitao (2010), we find the evidence for the EKC in European countries for carbon emissions. Our results find a negative relationship between pollution and rule of law, demonstrating that when rule of law is strong, the turning point of the EKC occurs at a lower level of income per capita, thus, decreasing emissions. In terms of policy implication, our study suggests that institutional reinforcement should deserve close attention in designing and enforcing policies that limit environmental degradation.Environmental Kuznets Curve, Rule of law, Panel data, Turning point

A Parsing-Proof Whole: Susan Howe’s Experimental Syntax and Its Processing Implications

It has long been acknowledged that syntactic violations in poetry are central to the difficulty of a poetic text (e.g. Fowler 1971, Fois-Kaschel 2002, Burke 2007, Thoms 2008). However, for all its merits, most of the work carried out so far tends either to be more concerned with linguistic theory than with literary effects (i.e. the generativist tradition); or, conversely, it treats syntactic violations as ancillary elements of broader contextual concerns (i.e. literary criticism). It should be the business of stylistics to map the uncharted territory in between these two approaches, explaining syntactic effects at a textual level. Yet, when it comes to syntax, most work in stylistics confines itself to a few canonical authors (notably Dylan Thomas and E.E. Cummings) whilst ignoring later developments of experimental writing (e.g. John Ashbery, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein). The present paper aims to widen the purview of poetic texts open to stylistic scrutiny as well as to make subtler predictions regarding the relationship between types of syntactic phenomena and resulting literary and processing effects. In particular, I show how different stylistic strategies (e.g. the blurring of constituency, syntactic ambiguity, the avoidance of main verbs) lead to very differentreaderly responses. My main case study is Susan Howe’s experimental poetry, whose ‘incomplete statements’ (Middleton 2010: 637) and ‘asyntactic writing’ (Quartermain 1992: 184) have called for extensive critical commentaries. I analyse the blurring of word classes and functions in a poem from the collection Bed Hangings (2001), leading to multiple garden paths and to a posited reading that de-emphasizes syntactic relations in favour of a coarse semantic processing guided by freestanding nouns and adjectives. I conclude by showing empirically that these parsing difficulties are reflected in reading times that are much longer than those for other poems with more moderate syntactic disruptions

Nel mondo sensibile: realismo empatico nella poesia italiana contemporanea

Il presente saggio si propone di esplorare un’area della poesia italiana contemporanea che finora ha ricevuto scarsa attenzione critica. Si chiamerà quest’area con il descrittore estetico realismo empatico, dove il realismo è interpretato in chiave naturalista e l’empatia concepita come un rapporto di allineamento fra narratore e personaggi. L’analisi comparativa di 29 campioni testuali tratti da 11 autori si sofferma su varie strategie mimetiche e narrative solitamente associate allo studio del romanzo nella narratologia classica. Particolare attenzione è riservata alla rappresentazione dei referenti e alla loro traduzione in immagini verbali, sia prese singolarmente sia nei loro rapporti di concatenazione sintagmatica. Gli strumenti della stilistica tradizionale sono implementati da ulteriori strumenti analitici che, sulla scorta della grammatica visiva di Gunther Kress e Teo van Leeuwen, postulano una sostanziale convergenza fra testi verbali e immagini. Il saggio si conclude elencando i tratti stilistici tipici del realismo empatico nella poesia italiana più recente.The paper aims at exploring a still under-investigated strand of contemporary Italian poetry. I propose to use the aesthetic descriptor empathic realism in order to encompass it, whereby realism is interpreted in naturalistic terms and empathy is conceived of as a relationship of alignment between narrator and character(s). I analyze and compare 29 textual samples drawn from 11 authors and focus on various mimetic and narrative strategies which traditional narratology typically associates to fiction writing. A special emphasis is given to the representation of referents and to their translation into verbal images, either standalone or arranged in syntagmatic sequences. The tools of traditional stylistics are complemented by additional analytical tools which, following Gunther Kress and Teo van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design, assume a high degree of overlap between verbal texts and images. The study concludes by listing a set of stylistic features characterizing empathic realism in recent Italian poetry

Environment and economic growth: is the rule of law the go-between? The case of high-income countries

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Difficulty in Anglo-American poetry: a linguistic and empirical perspective

This project sets out to develop a model for a study of difficulty in poetry as systematic and nuanced as possible. In doing so, it endeavours to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the fields of stylistics, poetics and literary theory. Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of difficulty in poetry has never ceased to interest linguists, literary theorists, psychologists and researchers in education. The popularity of the notion among non-specialist is equally significant, as it is not uncommon for readers to justify their lack of interest in poetry on the grounds of its supposed difficulty. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of text-reader interaction – the defining trait of difficulty, as argued in Chapter 1 – remains notably underexplored. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by (a) providing a psychologically plausible and linguistically sound account of difficulty; and by (b) unifying under a coherent framework the insights offered by a large body of materials – from critical readings of literary works to anecdotal evidence, from psychological models of comprehension to controlled psycholinguistic experiments. In terms of methodology, a linguistic, text-based approach is intertwined with an empirical, reader-based one. This combined effort leads to an in-depth analysis of a set of poems from both perspectives (Chapter 3 to 5). Such a qualitative approach allows for the identification of textual and readerly components typical of difficulty. On the textual side, I identify twenty-four features, called linguistic indicators of difficulty and affecting all the linguistic levels – graphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and text structure. Based on scholarly remarks and experimental evidence, these indicators are likely to hamper readers’ comprehension and thus increase the processing effort they require. These two main readerly dimensions of difficulty I qualify as online (i.e. affecting the processing effort in actual reading) and offline (i.e. affecting the post-reading understanding of a poem). In turn, online and offline difficulty are cued by observable readerly behaviours (e.g. interpretive uncertainty, slowed-down reading, statements of rejection) that are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, difficulty is viewed as a response phenomenon that has a strong linguistic motivation. For reasons of focus and critical consistency, the model is applied to twentieth and twentieth-first century Anglo-American poems only. This temporal restriction acknowledges the critically established connection between difficulty and modernism (e.g. Adams 1991, Adamson 1999, Diepeveen 2003). The case studies from Chapter 3 to 5 focus on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe and Jeremy H. Prynne as representing different aspects of difficulty. Chapter 6 extends this purview to a larger corpus, featuring Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. All these poets have been deemed ‘difficult’ by other critics, so the corpus rests on an intersubjective agreement that was missing in previous accounts. The hope is that the model proposed will be fruitfully extended and applied to non-Anglo-American literary traditions as well as to poetry written in earlier centuries

The evolution of theatre attendance in Italy: patrons and companies

This paper examines the Italian theatre market from both the demand and supply side. The descriptive analysis shows that the Italian theatre market is, mainly, localized in the Northern and Central Italian regions for both patrons and companies, confirming a cultural divide between the Southern and the rest of the Italian regions also in the theatrical sector. Like many other European countries, the performing arts in Italy are subsided by public funds through the so-called Fondo Unico per lo Spettacolo (FUS), thereby influencing theatre performance and attendance. As expected, the distribution of the FUS follows the localization of the theatrical companies. The empirical analysis is conducted using 34-year panel data (1980-2013) for the 20 Italian regions. By applying the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) estimation technique, we identify the factors influencing theatre demand and supply. The estimated results confirm as determinants of theatre demand, price and consumer income and additionally, cultural capital (proxied by education), substitute goods (such as cinema) and other contextual factors (such as tourists flows and territorial area). In contrast, theatre supply is influenced by income, previous historical attendance, theatrical employment, and other contextual factors linked to territorial and public subsidies

ICTs and time-span in technical efficiency gains. A stochastic frontier approach over a panel of Italian manufacturing firms

This paper, in contrast to much of the existing literature, which focuses on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on labour productivity, assesses the relationship between ICTs investments and Technical Efficiency (TE) using a stochastic frontier approach. We use a large panel dataset of Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1995-2006 and confirm prior findings of the existing literature on ICT and productivity. In addition, we test on which extend the ICT investments influence the distance of the firm from the production frontier; that is, how ICT’s adoption influences the closing of the firm efficiency gap. We also test how long the effects of ICT investments on technical efficiency last. We find that ICT returns on TE are influenced by some firm’s characteristics, most of them idiosyncratic, such as management practices, labour organization, research and development

The evolution of theatre attendance in Italy: patrons and companies

This paper examines the Italian theatre market from both the demand and supply side. The descriptive analysis shows that the Italian theatre market is, mainly, localized in the Northern and Central Italian regions for both patrons and companies, confirming a cultural divide between the Southern and the rest of the Italian regions also in the theatrical sector. Like many other European countries, the performing arts in Italy are subsided by public funds through the so-called Fondo Unico per lo Spettacolo (FUS), thereby influencing theatre performance and attendance. As expected, the distribution of the FUS follows the localization of the theatrical companies. The empirical analysis is conducted using 34-year panel data (1980-2013) for the 20 Italian regions. By applying the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) estimation technique, we identify the factors influencing theatre demand and supply. The estimated results confirm as determinants of theatre demand, price and consumer income and additionally, cultural capital (proxied by education), substitute goods (such as cinema) and other contextual factors (such as tourists flows and territorial area). In contrast, theatre supply is influenced by income, previous historical attendance, theatrical employment, and other contextual factors linked to territorial and public subsidies

ICTs and lags in technical efficiency gains. A stochastic frontier approach over a panel of Italian manufacturing firms

This paper analyses the relationship between investment in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Technical Efficiency (TE). It uses a panel dataset of Italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995-2003. In contrast to much of the existing literature which focuses on the impact of ICT on labour or multifactor productivity, the paper analyses the relationship between ICT and TE using a stochastic frontier approach. Results show that ICT investment is positively associated with productivity and efficiency, but that the elasticities are lower than those associated with non-ICT capital and labour. Moreover, ICT investments have a positive effect on firm TE, and the impact of ICTs reduces firm inefficiency with a strong time lag since their adoption. Finally, the paper makes a methodological contribution by showing that a Cobb-Douglas production frontier is rejected in favour of a translog one