Education, Aspirations and Life Satisfaction

The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases people’s wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology. Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that people’s life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility. In this paper I suggest that expanding work and consumption opportunities is a good thing for decision utility but may not be so for experienced utility. On this premise, I argue that people may overrate their socioeconomic prospects relative to real life chances and I discuss how systematic frustration over unfulfilled expectations can be connected to people’s educational achievement. I test the model’s predictions on Italian data and find preliminary support for the idea that education and access to stimulating environments may have a perverse impact on life satisfaction. I also find evidence that the latter effect is mediated by factors such as gender and age. Indeed, the model seeks to go beyond the Italian case and provide more general insights into how age/life satisfaction relationships can be modelled and explained.education, opportunities, aspirations, life satisfaction, regret

Education, social capital and entrepreneurial selection in Italy

There is wide consensus that entrepreneurial talent is the ability to discover and exploit market opportunities by taking the relevant risky decisions. Discovery and exploitation are separate but interlinked features of entrepreneurship requiring, in different proportions, the exploitation of innate and acquired skills. Institutions and technology, by determining the nature of the discovery and exploitation process and the need for such skills, play an essential role in shaping the nature of entrepreneurial talent and the specific role of education in entrepreneurial selection and performance. Empirical studies on entrepreneurship do not offer a neat picture of the actual contribution of education to entrepreneurial human capital or entrepreneurial talent. This unsatisfactory outcome is not surprising and is due to an inadequate assessment of the context-dependent factors shaping the latter. Building on these premises, the aim of our research work is to carry out a in depth analysis of the determinants of entrepreneurship in Italy, thus accounting for the role that variables like the educational qualification, the family background, and social capital play in determining the entrepreneurial selection. This paper attempts to constitute a first step for the improvement of our understanding by means of a preliminary, exploratory, analysis on the Italian data and a series of probit analyses aimed at identifying the main determinants founding the entrepreneurial choice. Rough data are taken from an original dataset built by the authors partly drawing on the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) carried out by the Bank of Italy. The latter has been integrated with a wide variety of environmental variables drawn from different data sources describing the social and institutional context of the entrepreneurial activity.Education; Work status; Employment; Self-employment; Entrepreneurship; Human capital; Social capital; Cognitive abilities

Robust Steering of n-level Quantum Systems

Robust open-loop steering of a finite-dimensional quantum system is a central problem in a growing number of applications of information engineering. In the present paper, we reformulate the problem in the classical control-theoretic setting, and provide a precise definition of {\em robustness} of the control strategy. We then discuss and compare some significant problems from NMR in the light of the given definition. We obtain quantitative results that are consistent with the qualitative ones available in the physics literature.Comment: 10 page

Minimum Relative Entropy for Quantum Estimation: Feasibility and General Solution

We propose a general framework for solving quantum state estimation problems using the minimum relative entropy criterion. A convex optimization approach allows us to decide the feasibility of the problem given the data and, whenever necessary, to relax the constraints in order to allow for a physically admissible solution. Building on these results, the variational analysis can be completed ensuring existence and uniqueness of the optimum. The latter can then be computed by standard, efficient standard algorithms for convex optimization, without resorting to approximate methods or restrictive assumptions on its rank.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

Computational Chemistry Tools for Atomic Level Investigation of Clay Composites

The most common computational methods used for the investigation of molecular and periodic systems will be briefly described, with particular emphasis on those approaches that could be employed for the study of clay structures at the atomistic level. The first part of the chapter is mainly dedicated to the conceptual basis of density functional theory and its implementation for molecular and periodic systems. The tight binding approximation to density functional theory and its modern variants, particularly suitable for atomistic studies of large systems, is treated as well. Classical molecular mechanics and molecular dynamics methods, as well as the definition of force fields suitable for clay materials, are shortly discussed. In the second part, case studies of application of computational approaches for the characterization of structures and properties of clay materials (in particular, the halloysite nanotube) are reported

Culturally-based beliefs and labour market institutions

This paper has two main goals. The first is to provide empirical evidence that differences in labour market institutions across countries and, specifically, in how they provide protection to workers, can be attributed to underlying differences in culturally-based prior beliefs: in particular, people’s fatalism and trust in others. The second goal is to single out the socio-economic factors associated with these beliefs and the role of education in this regard.Culture, Fatalism, Trust in Others, Labour Market Institutions, Employment Protection Legislation

L-2 State Estimation With Guaranteed Convergence Speed in the Presence of Sporadic Measurements

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the state of a nonlinear time-invariant system in the presence of sporadically available measurements and external perturbations. An observer with a continuous intersample injection term is proposed. Such an intersample injection is provided by a linear dynamical system, whose state is reset to the measured output estimation error whenever a new measurement is available. The resulting system is augmented with a timer triggering the arrival of a new measurement and analyzed in a hybrid system framework. The design of the observer is performed to achieve exponential convergence with a given decay rate of the estimation error. Robustness with respect to external perturbations and L2-external stability from plant perturbations to a given performance output are considered. Computationally efficient algorithms based on the solution to linear matrix inequalities are proposed to design the observer. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methodology is shown in an example

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Cost Evaluation for Hybrid Inclusions: A Lyapunov Approach

International audienceCost evaluation problems for hybrid inclusions are studied. Sufficient conditions, in the form of Lyapunov-like inequalities, are provided to derive an upper bound on the cost associated with the solution to a hybrid inclusion with respect to a hybrid cost functional. Under additional sufficient conditions, we determine the cost exactly without computing solutions. Constructive results are proposed to solve cost evaluation problems in some relevant applications. Numerical examples are presented