Portfolio Infrastructure Investments: an Analysis of the European and UK Cases

Infrastructure has been receiving much attention in recent years. Investment banks and fund managers are increasingly promoting the investment characteristics of infrastructure assets and they argue that investing in infrastructure should be ideal for institutional investors such as pension funds. However, the claim lacks empirical support. We suggest that the limited research on infrastructure is mainly due to scant empirical data. The objectives of this paper are to examine the significance of economic infrastructure as an asset class by assessing the investment characteristics and performance of infrastructure indexes in Europe and UK from 2000-2014, to analyse how an infrastructure portfolio should be constructed and to determine whether the private sector should invest in an infrastructure portfolio containing a variety of infrastructure sectors or if the private sector should invest in one specific sector only

Technological Spillovers and Productivity in Italian Manufacturing Firms

We study whether a firm’s total factor productivity dynamics is positively influenced by its own R&D activity and by the technological spillovers generated at the intra- and inter-sectorial level. Our approach corrects simultaneously for the endogeneity and the selectivity biases introduced by the use of a firm’s own R&D as a regressor. A firm’s involvement in R&D activities accounts for significant productivity gains. Firms also benefit from spillovers originating from their own industries, as well as from innovative upstream sectors.R&D, TFP, selectivity, treatment effect

Technological Spillovers and Productivity in Italian Manufacturing Firms

We study whether a firm’s total factor productivity dynamics is positively influenced by its own R&D activity and by the technological spillovers generated at the intra- and inter-sectorial level. Our approach corrects simultaneously for the endogeneity and the selectivity biases introduced by the use of a firm’s own R&D as a regressor. A firm’s involvement in R&D activities accounts for significant productivity gains. Firms also benefit from spillovers originating from their own industries, as well as from innovative upstream sectors.R&D, TFP, selectivity, treatment effect

Portfolio Structuring Model for Urban Infrastructure Investments

The objective of this work is to propose a new methodology based on the concept of portfolio structuring for urban infrastructure investment. We argue that city investments need to be treated as an integrated and interdependent entity and from this perspective, the portfolio methodology is proposed in order to assess the non-financial impacts of infrastructure projects and then combine them in a portfolio of investments from a financial perspective. The methodology is applied for a set of project under the EIB JESSICA Initiative. The methodology shows that not only is it possible to develop a practical decision support system to assist stakeholders in assessing the performance of individual urban infrastructure projects, but also how it is possible to combine projects into a portfolio. The method exceeds the simple analysis of returns of individual investment schemes and capitalizes on effective and integrated management of projects/investment. And this is the key to devising a focused response which will enable therefore cities to be globally competitive, via innovative financial and business models

Portfolio of Infrastructure Investments: Analysis of European Infrastructure

Infrastructure has received much attention in recent years. Investment in infrastructure is particularly effective and has been recommended to institutional investors for investments such as pension funds because of the characteristics of infrastructure assets. However, robust analytical and empirical analyses in support of these investments are limited, mainly due to scant empirical data. In this work, by collecting relevant data sets on infrastructures, the authors address two objectives. First, the authors examine the significance of listed infrastructure sectors and subsectors by assessing the investment characteristics and performance of different infrastructure indexes in Europe. The aim here is to demonstrate how an effective and successful infrastructure portfolio should be constructed. The second objective of this research is to evaluate the strategy of infrastructure investors, in other words, to prove evidentially whether the investor should invest in a portfolio containing different infrastructure sectors or whether it is still possible to obtain diversification benefits by investing in only a single infrastructure sector

Effect of variation of salinity on protein, RNA and DNA contents of liver, muscle and ovary of female singi fish, heteropneustes fossilis (Bloch), at two phases of reproductive cycle

Investigou-se as mudanças causadas nos teores de proteínasje ácidos nucleicos do fígado, músculo, ovários e peso dos orgãos (HSI, GSI) pela variação de salinidade do meio (65, 135 e 225_mOsm, NaCl/litro2 e salinidade zero ou água destilada) em fêmeas nao vitelogenicas (NV) e vitelogênicas (V) do peixe Heteropneustes fossilis (Bloch) às temperaturas de 25ºC e 30ºC, 30 dias após o período de aclimação nos respectivos meios. Obteve-se valores máximos de HSI tanto nos peixes (NV) e (V) quando mantidos em água destilada e valores mínimos quando em solução de 225 mOsm. 0 aumento de temperatura de 25ºC para 30°C causou uma redução nos valores de HSI somente nos peixes (V). Salinidade de 135 e 65-135 mOsm produziu o valor mais alto de GSI nos dois grupos de peixes: (NV) e (V). 0 efeito estimulante da alta temperatura (30°C) no GSI foi encontrado somente nos peixes (NV) em todos os meios salinos. 0 teor hepático de proteínas e RNA foi máximo nos peixes (NV) e (V) mantidos em meios de 65 mOsm de NaCl e mínimo nos de 225 mOsm de salinidade. 0 aumento de temperatura de 25ºC para 30ºC não alterou o teor protéico hepático mas aumentou e diminuiu o teor de RNA nas fases (V) e (NV). 0 teor muscular de proteínas e RNA foram máximos a salinidadgs zero e 65 mOsm e mínimos a 225 mOsm tanto a 25ºC , como 30ºC. A alta temperatura (30°C) aumentou o teor protéico, mas não alterou o teor de RNA. Salinidade de 135 mOsm causou o maior aumento nos teores dg proteínas, RNA e DNA do ovário das fêmeas (NV) a 25°C ou 30ºC. Salinidade zero reduziu bastante o teor desta substância no ovário. No caso do GSI o efeito estimulador da alta temperatura (30°C) no acúmulo de proteínas, RNA e DNA se fez sentir em todas as concentrações salinas do meio. Os peixes (V) apresentaram teor máximo de proteínas ovarianas a salinidade de 135 mOsm e mínimos em água destilada. Os ovários (V) tiveram a taxa mais alta de DNA em 65 e 135 mOsm de salinidade do que a zero ou 225 mOsm. A influência das altas temperaturas não foi sentida nas fêmeas (V). 0 teor de RNA ovariano dos peixes (V) também não se alterou em todas as condições experimentais.

PERSISTENCE OF IMMUNITY TO POLIOMYELITIS AMONG A SOUTHERN POPULATION THAT RECEIVED FOUR DOSES OF OPV 5 TO OVER 15 YEARS BEFORE

The immune status against polioviruses was investigated in a population of 545 students aged 11-20 years residing in the Neapolitan area, who had completed the vaccination cycle with four doses of OPV 5 to over 15 years before. Assuming as unprotected those individuals without detectable neutralizing antibodies at the dilution 1:2, nobody resulted without protection against all types of poliovirus; 0.7% lacked antibodies only against type 1, 0.6% only against type 3 and none against type 2. A very slight decreasing trend was observed for GMT values in function of the distance from the last dose of OPV for polio 1 and 2, but not for polio 3. As expected, GMT values for polio 2 resulted higher than those for polio 1 and both were higher than those for polio 3, when calculated by age groups as well as by distance groups. The last four Italian cases of autochthonous paralytic poliomyelitis, occurred in the period 1981/83, regarded unvaccinated children aged 6 months-2 years, residing in the same geographical area to which the study population belong. In the same area a delay of immunization practices was also ascertained in the recent past. Results of this study confirm that a priority for public health services is to devote their human and economic resources to reduce the vaccination delay more than administrate a further fifth dose of OPV at the age of twelve

Implementing the “Best Template Searching” tool into Adenosiland platform

Background: Adenosine receptors (ARs) belong to the G protein-coupled receptors (GCPRs) family. The recent release of X-ray structures of the human A2A AR (h A2A AR ) in complex with agonists and antagonists has increased the application of structure-based drug design approaches to this class of receptors. Among them, homology modeling represents the method of choice to gather structural information on the other receptor subtypes, namely A1, A2B, and A3 ARs. With the aim of helping users in the selection of either a template to build its own models or ARs homology models publicly available on our platform, we implemented our web-resource dedicated to ARs, Adenosiland, with the “Best Template Searching” facility. This tool is freely accessible at the following web address: http://mms.dsfarm.unipd.it/Adenosiland/ligand.php. Findings: The template suggestions and homology models provided by the “Best Template Searching” tool are guided by the similarity of a query structure (putative or known ARs ligand) with all ligands co-crystallized with hA2A AR subtype. The tool computes several similarity indexes and sort the outcoming results according to the index selected by the user. Conclusions: We have implemented our web-resource dedicated to ARs Adenosiland with the “Best Template Searching” facility, a tool to guide template and models selection for hARs modelling. The underlying idea of our new facility, that is the selection of a template (or models built upon a template) whose co-crystallized ligand shares the highest similarity with the query structure, can be easily extended to other GPCRs

Automatic Information Extraction from Investment Product Documents

In this paper we report on the activities carried out within a collaboration between Consob and Sapienza University. The developed project focus on Information Extraction from documents describing financial investment products. We discuss how we automate this task, via both rule-based and machine learningbased methods, and describe the performances of our approach