Grandparents and women's participation in the labor market

The conciliation of work and family life is a challenge to most women. In some countries, although not in southern Europe, women make significant use of part-time schedules as a way of balancing work and family life. Informal care, typically care by grandparents, is an alternative. It is cheap, trustworthy, and possibly compatible with non-standard labor schedules. In this paper we investigate how childcare by grandparents affects the probability of working of mothers in southern European countries. We empirically evaluate the verification and the significance of such an effect, accounting for a potentially endogenous grandparent-caring status.labor market, women, childcare, grandparents, ageing.

GENERALIZED EXTERNALITY GAMES

Externality games are studied in Grafe et al. (1998). We define a generalization of this class of games and show, using the methodology in Izquierdo and Rafels (1996 and 2001), some properties of the new class of generalized externality games. They include, among others, the algebraic structure of the game, convexity, and their implication for the study of cooperative solutions. Also the proportional rule is characterized for this class of games.

Determinants of tourism destination competitiveness in the countries most visited by international tourists: Proposal of a synthetic index

Tourism destination competitiveness is a multidimensional concept that is widely studied in the academic literature, but multiple factors make its measurement a difficult task. In this article, we design a synthetic index to rank the 80 countries that attract the majority of international tourists by level of tourism competitiveness. In order to do this, we use all of the simple variables included in the 2017 Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, proposing a new methodology for the construction of this synthetic index, which it solves the problems of aggregation of variables expressed in different measures, arbitrary weighting and duplicity of information; issues that remain unresolved by the TTCI. Likewise, we analyse the most influential dimensions in tourism competitiveness. Air transport infrastructures, cultural resources and ICT readiness are the key dimensions that explain the main disparities.Funding Agency Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness State Research Agency (SRA) European Union (EU) ECO2017-86822-Rinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Issues on the residents’ perceptions of the impacts of tourism development: the case-study of Guimarães

In recent years peripheral regions, such as Guimarães, in the Northwest of Portugal, has been experiencing the expansion of its tourism industry. This occurred, may be, as part of the wish felt by a large number of tourists of reaching “unspoilt†landscapes and more “authentical†experiences (Nepal, 2008). After the nomination by U.N.E.S.C.O., in 2001, of its historical centre as world heritage, the city of Guimarães is now in the process of hosting the 2012 European Capital of Culture. These recent facts helped to reinforce its external visibility and cultural significance and put it in the trail to become a more consolidated cultural tourism destination. This paper aims presenting a few results of a survey that envisaged capturing the Guimarães residents’ perceptions of tourism effects and attitudes regarding the tourists. The survey was implemented between January and March 2010 to a convenience sample of 540 inhabitants of the municipality of Guimarães. The results show that the Guimarães` residents keep a strong positive perception of the tourism benefits. The more or less favourable perception of tourism impacts the survey respondents kept are strongly correlated with some demographic features, such as age, gender and level of education. As expected, we got a more positive perception among the younger cohorts of age and the ones endowed with a higher level of education.

The Informal Sector

This paper investigates the determinants of informal economic activity. We present two equilibrium models of informality and test their implications using a survey of 48,000+ small firms in Brazil. We define informality as tax avoidance; firms in the informal sector avoid tax payments but suffer other limitations. In the first model there is a single industry and informal firms face a higher cost of capital and a limitation on size. As a result informal firms are smaller and have a lower capital labor ratio. When education is an imperfect proxy for ability, we show that the interaction of the manager's education and formality has a positive correlation with firm size. These implications are supported by our empirical analysis. The second model highlights the role of value added taxes in transmitting informality. It predicts that the informality of a firm is correlated to the informality of firms from which it buys or sells. The model implies that higher tolerance for informal firms in one production stage increases tax avoidance in downstream and upstream sectors. Empirical analysis shows that, in fact, various measures of formality of suppliers and purchasers (and its enforcement) are correlated with the formality of a firm. Even more interestingly, when we look at sectors where Brazilian firms are not subject to the credit system of value added tax, this chain effect vanishes.

Field evidence of social influence in the expression of political preferences: the case of secessionist flags in Barcelona

Different models of social influence have explored the dynamics of social contagion, imitation, and diffusion of different types of traits, opinions, and conducts. However, few behavioral data indicating social influence dynamics have been obtained from direct observation in `natural' social contexts. The present research provides that kind of evidence in the case of the public expression of political preferences in the city of Barcelona, where thousands of citizens supporting the secession of Catalonia from Spain have placed a Catalan flag in their balconies. We present two different studies. 1) In July 2013 we registered the number of flags in 26% of the the city. We find that there is a large dispersion in the density of flags in districts with similar density of pro-independence voters. However, we find that the density of flags tends to be fostered in those electoral district where there is a clear majority of pro-independence vote, while it is inhibited in the opposite cases. 2) During 17 days around Catalonia's 2013 National Holiday we observed the position at balcony resolution of the flags displayed in the facades of 82 blocks. We compare the clustering of flags on the facades observed each day to equivalent random distributions and find that successive hangings of flags are not independent events but that a local influence mechanism is favoring their clustering. We also find that except for the National Holiday day the density of flags tends to be fostered in those facades where there is a clear majority of pro-independence vote.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 2 table

Strategy for Economic Growth in Brazil: a Post Keynesian Approach

The paper proposes a Keynesian strategy for economic policy that aims to achieve higher, stable and sustained economic growth in Brazil. Its main hypothesis is that the current poor growth performance of the Brazilian economy is due to macroeconomic and structural constraints rather than to the lack of microeconomic reforms.economic policy, economic growth, Post-Keynesian theory

Diffusion-viscosity decoupling in supercooled glycerol aqueous solutions

The diffusion of ferrocene methanol in supercooled glycerol-water mixtures has been measured over a wide viscosity range, which allowed analyzing the composition dependence of the Stokes-Einstein breakdown (diffusion-viscosity decoupling). The observed decoupling exhibits a common behavior for all studied compositions (glycerol mass fractions between 0.7 and 0.9), determined by the reduced temperature (T/Tg) of the mixtures. This result differs from that reported previously for the diffusion of glycerol in its aqueous solutions, where the reduced temperature for the decoupling decreases with increasing water content. We conclude that the contradictory results are only apparent, and they can be explained by the use of inconsistent extrapolated values of the viscosity of the glycerol-water mixtures in the supercooled region. (Figure Presented).Fil: Trejo González, José Adolfo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Longinotti, María Paula. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Corti, Horacio Roberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; Argentin

Evaluation of the Sigma Quality level for Serum Iron determination by two colorimetric methods, Ferrozine and Ferene S

Iron plays important functions in the body such as the formation and functioning of hemoglobin and it’s disorders are among the most common diseases of human1. It is essential to ensure that its levels determination through laboratory tests are accurate and precise. The participation of laboratories in the External Quality Assessment (EQA) allows the increases of the quality level of the laboratory results and improvement of its performance.2This study was developed in the Portuguese Nacional EQA Program (PNAEQ) concerning the laboratories results from the Clinical Chemistry Scheme. The main objective of this study was to evaluate and improve the sigma quality level regarding the Iron parameter and reduce the variability of the laboratories results participating in the EQA program of Clinical Chemistry of the Nacional External Quality Assessment Program (PNAEQ). The mean Sigma quality level indicated that the Ferrozine method had a better performance compared with Ferene S method. Half of the control samples had a sigma quality level higher than 3.0, which is set as the minimum acceptable quality.3 Despite of the improved of the Sigma quality level in the Pilot Test, the results demonstrated a need to improved the analytical process performance and to identified more potential causes and implement new improvement actions. It becomes necessary to raise awareness with the laboratories, improving the Pilot Test participation frequency, resulting in a recurrent and current assessment of the laboratory activity performance. Developing Six Sigma projects on a periodic basis is important for continuously and progressively increasing the level of Sigma quality in laboratory examinations. The main advantage of quality assessment on the sigma scale is providing evidence of overall laboratory performance, taking into account random and systematic errors.N/