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In this paper we look at tax credit policy as an instrument to foster hiring with open-end rather than with fixed-term contracts. In particular, we examine a specific regulation adopted in Italy in the year 2000 (Credito d’Imposta). This policy offers a generous and automatic tax credit to all firms hiring workers with open-end contracts. The eligibility criteria are very mild for both firms and workers. Our results seem to indicate, both formally and empirically, that firms used this subsidy to hire under open-end contracts primarily those workers who would have been hired under such a contract regardless the subsidy, even though after a short transition into temporary employment. Our estimates suggest that, compared to 2000, in 2001 the subsidy did not increase the overall probability to be hired, but changed the composition of new employees. It increased the chances to find an open-end contract but in a rather uneven way across workers. Conditional on being hired, the probability rose by about 10 per cent for workers holding a college degree, by about 4 per cent for people with a high school diploma, while did no

Suono e Spettacolo. Athanasius Kircher, un percorso nelle Immagini sonore.

The Society of Jesus made great propaganda efforts throughout the seventeenth century and chose the images and the play as a privileged means to communicate and persuade. Athanasius Kircher, a key figure of the seventeenth century, he decided to dominate the wild nature of sound through Phonurgia Nova, which includes a gallery of powerful symbolic images for Baroque aesthetics. The essay, through the grant of the images from the Library of the Department of Mathematics "Guido Castelnuovo" Sapienza University of Rome, aims to understand, through the pictures offered by Kircher, the sound phenomenon and the spectacle that this produces. In Phonurgia Nova a process of dramatization sound effects takes place, often through machines and "visions" applied to the theatrical reality, as experimental and astonishing environment beloved in baroque. Kircher illustrates the sound through explanatory figures, so to dominate the sound through the eyes. Sound is seen, admired and represented: its spectacle not only takes place through the implementation of sound machines or the "wonders" applied to the theater, but even through images, creating create a sense of wonder in in the erudite person of the seventeenth century