The twin effects of globalization

Employees of"globalized"firms face a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, menu of labor market outcomes. The authors document this neglected tradeoff of globalization for a sample of Indian manufacturing firms. On the one hand, the employees of firms subject to foreign competition face a more uncertain stream of earnings and riskier employment prospects. On the other hand, they enjoy a more rapid career growth and have more opportunities to train and upgrade their skills. The negative uncertainty costs and the positive incentive effects of globalization are thus twin to each other. Concentrating on just one side of the coin gives a misleading picture of globalization.Small Scale Enterprise,Environmental Economics&Policies,Microfinance,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Microfinance,Private Participation in Infrastructure,Small Scale Enterprise

The Twin Effects of Globalization - Evidence from a Sample of Indian Manufacturing Firms

Employees of globalized firms face a riskier menu of labor market outcomes. They face a more uncertain stream of earnings and riskier employment prospects. However, they may also have stronger incentives to train and upgrade their skills and/or may benefit from more rapid careers. Hence, the costs of uncertainty and the benefits of skill upgrading associated with globalization may be twin to each other. We provide statistical evidence of this so far neglected trade-off for a sample of Indian manufacturing firms.globalization, uncertainty, training, labor markets, India

The Twin Effects of Globalization

\'Globalized\' workers enjoy a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, menu of labor market outcomes. This, so far overlooked, feature of globalization is documented here for a sample of Indian manufacturing Þrms. Firms subject to external exposure, be they exporting, import-competing or foreign-owned, indeed face higher earnings variability and job insecurity. At the same time, though, the employees of foreign-owned and import-competing firms are more frequently involved in training programs than employees of Þrms not subject to foreign competition. Similarly, the employees of exporting firms are promoted more frequently than otherwise. The \'bad\' and the \'good\' labormarket effects of globalization are thus twin to each other. Concentrating on just one side of the coin gives a misleading picture of globalization.

Black Holes through the lenses of Effective Field Theory

The detection of gravitational waves emitted by black hole binaries opens a window to test the theory of General Relativity and to probe the dynamics of gravity in regimes otherwise inaccessible. To fully exploit this opportunity, it is necessary to understand which are the consistent and detectable deviations from General Relativity. To single out these possible deviations, one must also be able to recognize effects due to environmental perturbations of the binary system, as these may lead to departures within General Relativity from the waveform of an ideal isolated binary.In this thesis, we approach some aspects of both these theoretical challenges from the point of view of effective field theory.First, we study how to narrow down the space of theories that can describe detectable deviations from General Relativity based on consistency with the fundamental principles of our description of nature. We consider the simple example of General Relativity modified by the presence of a shift-symmetric scalar field coupled only to gravity. In this context, we first show that only a specific scalar-graviton interaction can lead to black holes different from what General Relativity predicts while being consistently included in an effective field theory description. Then we study how causality, unitarity and locality constrain this interaction. We show that if this interaction is strong enough to leave an imprint detectable with the next gravitational wave interferometers, then causality would require new degrees of freedom to appear at very low energies.In the second part of this work, we consider one example of environmental perturbation that can affect black hole mergers: a distant third body orbiting the black hole binary.To study efficiently such a system, we derive a worldline effective action describing the relativistic effects due to the third body on timescales much longer than the orbital periods. Using techniques from non-relativistic General Relativity, we obtain a description of the two orbits as two interacting particles endowed with multipole moments. We carry out these computations up to quadrupole order in the three-body interaction, including the leading relativistic corrections. This approach allows to study novel long timescale effects that can enhance the rate of orbital flips of the inner binary

Nitrogen Fractionation in External Galaxies

In star forming regions in our own Galaxy, the 14N/15N ratio is found to vary from $\sim$ 100 in meteorites, comets and protoplanetary disks up to $\sim$ 1000 in pre-stellar and star forming cores, while in external galaxies the very few single-dish large scale measurements of this ratio lead to values of 100-450. The extent of the contribution of isotopic fractionation to these variations is, to date, unknown. In this paper we present a theoretical chemical study of nitrogen fractionation in external galaxies in order to determine the physical conditions that may lead to a spread of the 14N/15N ratio from the solar value of $\sim$440 and hence evaluate the contribution of chemical reactions in the ISM to nitrogen fractionation. We find that the main cause of ISM enrichment of nitrogen fractionation is high gas densities, aided by high fluxes of cosmic rays.Comment: Accepted by MNRA

Ocular-based automatic summarization of documents: is re-reading informative about the importance of a sentence?

Automatic document summarization (ADS) has been introduced as a viable solution for reducing the time and the effort needed to read the ever-increasing textual content that is disseminated. However, a successful universal ADS algorithm has not yet been developed. Also, despite progress in the field, many ADS techniques do not take into account the needs of different readers, providing a summary without internal consistency and the consequent need to re-read the original document. The present study was aimed at investigating the usefulness of using eye tracking for increasing the quality of ADS. The general idea was of that of finding ocular behavioural indicators that could be easily implemented in ADS algorithms. For instance, the time spent in re-reading a sentence might reflect the relative importance of that sentence, thus providing a hint for the selection of text contributing to the summary. We have tested this hypothesis by comparing metrics based on the analysis of eye movements of 30 readers with the highlights they made afterward. Results showed that the time spent reading a sentence was not significantly related to its subjective value, thus frustrating our attempt. Results also showed that the length of a sentence is an unavoidable confounding because longer sentences have both the highest probability of containing units of text judged as important, and receive more fixations and re-fixations

The Bernstein problem in Heisenberg groups

In these notes, we collect the main and, to the best of our knowledge, most up-to-date achievements concerning the Bernstein problem in the Heisenberg group; that is, the problem of determining whether the only entire minimal graphs are hyperplanes. We analyze separately the problem for t-graphs and for intrinsic graphs: in the first case, the Bernstein Conjecture turns out to be false in any dimension, and a complete characterization of minimal graphs is available in H1 for the smooth case. A positive result is instead available for Lipschitz intrinsic graphs in H1; moreover, one can see that the conjecture is false in Hn with n at least 5, by adapting the Euclidean counterexample in high dimension; the problem is still open when n is 2, 3 or 4