Are Exporters More Likely to Introduce Product Innovations?

A firm\'s export status may improve its capacity of introducing product innovations. We explore this idea using very rich firm-level data on Italian A firm\'s export status may improve its capacity of introducing product innovations. We explore this idea using very rich firm-level data on Italian Manufacturing, and sector-province specific measures of firms\' distance from export markets and of their export market potential as instruments for differences in export activities. We find that exporting significantly increases the likelihood of introducing product innovations and that this effect is not fully captured by the channels commonly stressed by the theoretical literature, such as larger market (and accordingly firm) size or higher investments in R&D. We argue that heterogeneity in foreign customers\' tastes and needs may explain our findings.Exporters, Firms, Italy, Manufacturing, Product Innovation

Exporting and Product Innovation at the Firm Level

Past research showed that exporters perform better than non-exporters in several domains, micro-level empirical evidence on the innovation-enhancing effect of export is, however, very scant. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between a firm's export status and its product innovation activity by using a rich firm-level survey on Italian manufacturing. First, we find that the positive effect of exporting on product innovativeness is robust to controlling for many sources of firm's observable heterogeneity and to allowing export activity to be endogenous. Second, we report evidence that the effect of exporting on product innovation is likely to be demand-driven, that is to originate from the interaction between domestic firms and foreign customers.Exporting, Firms, Italy, Manufacturing, Product Innovation

Enhancing immunity by engineering DAMPs

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Inequality and Structural Change under Non-Linear Engels' Curve

We analyze the relationship between income inequality and structural change in the sectoral composition of the tradable and the non-tradable sectors. We construct a small open economy two sector model where preferences imply non-linear Engel curves and we show that the relationship between income inequality and structural change crucially depends on the non-linearity of the Engel curves. We calibrate this model to the US economy in the period 1960-2010 and we show that it explains the observed patterns of structural change in terms of the sectoral composition of consumption and employment, it also explains the increase in inequality measured by the Gini index and, finally, it is consistent with the large reduction in the trade balance. From the analysis of several counterfactual exercises, we obtain the following insights: (i) income inequality contributes to explain structural change and reduces GDP when Engel curves are nonlinear; (ii) asset accumulation and the time path of GNP do not depend on the level of inequality, but on the evolution of income inequality; and (iii) a rising inequality implies a faster accumulation of assets, a larger growth of GNP and a fester deterioration of the trade balance

GRP-3 and KAPP, encoding interactors of WAK1, negatively affect defense responses induced by oligogalacturonides and local response to wounding

Conserved microbe-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs) and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) act as danger signals to activate the plant immune response. These molecules are recognized by surface receptors that are referred to as pattern recognition receptors. Oligogalacturonides (OGs), DAMPs released from the plant cell wall homogalacturonan, have also been proposed to act as local signals in the response to wounding. The Arabidopsis Wall-Associated Kinase 1 (WAK1), a receptor of OGs, has been described to form a complex with a cytoplasmic plasma membrane-localized kinase-associated protein phosphatase (KAPP) and a glycine-rich protein (GRP-3) that we find localized mainly in the cell wall and, in a small part, on the plasma membrane. By using Arabidopsis plants overexpressing WAK1, and both grp-3 and kapp null insertional mutant and overexpressing plants, we demonstrate a positive function of WAK1 and a negative function of GRP-3 and KAPP in the OG-triggered expression of defence genes and the production of an oxidative burst. The three proteins also affect the local response to wounding and the basal resistance against the necrotrophic pathogen Botrytis cinerea. GRP-3 and KAPP are likely to function in the phasing out of the plant immune response

READ-IT: assessing readability of Italian texts with a view to text simplification

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ-IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. In READ-IT readability assessment is carried out with respect to both documents and sentences where the latter represents an important novelty of the proposed approach creating the prerequisites for aligning the readability assessment step with the text simplification process. READ-IT shows a high accuracy in the document classification task and promising results in the sentence classification scenario

ULISSE: an unsupervised algorithm for detecting reliable dependency parses

In this paper we present ULISSE, an unsupervised linguistically--driven algorithm to select reliable parses from the output of a dependency parser. Different experiments were devised to show that the algorithm is robust enough to deal with the output of different parsers and with different languages, as well as to be used across different domains. In all cases, ULISSE appears to outperform the baseline algorithms

Model-Free Plant Tuning

Given a static plant described by a differentiable input-output function, which is completely unknown, but whose Jacobian takes values in a known polytope in the matrix space, this paper considers the problem of tuning (i.e., driving to a desired value) the output, by suitably choosing the input. It is shown that, if the polytope is robustly nonsingular (or has full rank, in the nonsquare case), then a suitable tuning scheme drives the output to the desired point. The proof exploits a Lyapunov-like function and applies a well-known game-theoretic result, concerning the existence of a saddle point for a min-max zero-sum game. When the plant output is represented in an implicit form, it is shown that the same result can be obtained, resorting to a different Lyapunov-like function. The case in which proper input or output constraints must be enforced during the transient is considered as well. Some application examples are proposed to show the effectiveness of the approach