Explaining the Size Distribution of Plants: An Approach Based on Civic Capital

We show that the distribution of plant size within narrowly defined industries is affected by the variation in the stock of civic capital that occurs at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 2001 Italian Census of Manufacturing and Services. Civic capital turns out to have a positive effect on both the average and the standard deviation of the plant size distribution. This effect is stronger in labor-intensive industries. The potential endogeneity of current civic capital is addressed by instrumenting it with historical variables. Our interpretation for these results is that civic capital is associated with reduced opportunistic behavior, which improves intra-firm cooperation and hampers the incidence of principal-agent problems, thus allowing plants to operate on a larger scale.

Foreign ownership, firm performance, and the geography of civic capital

It is well established in the literature that foreign affiliates are subject to a series of governance and assimilation costs that deteriorate their performance. This is particularly relevant for firms which have been recently acquired by foreign investors. We employ the variation in civic capital across Italian provinces as an exogenous determinant of these governance costs. We derive the testable implication that there should be a clean evidence of a negative effect of foreign ownership on performance in areas where civic capital is low. As the level of local civic capital increases, this reduces the scope for internal transaction costs, and makes the governance of foreign affiliates easier, and their performance better. We take this prediction to the data and find confirmation of our conceptual framework. Our analysis underlines the importance of the geographic heterogeneity of informal institutions when analyzing the effect of foreign ownership on firm performance.

Alien Registration- Thompson, Minerva M. (Fryeburg, Oxford County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/18080/thumbnail.jp

Ursinus College Bulletin Vol. 13, No. 5, February 1897

A digitized copy of the February 1897 Ursinus College Bulletin.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ucbulletin/1122/thumbnail.jp

Hacia una teoría económica más humana: el aprendizaje económico del homo viator

El objetivo principal de este artículo es mostrar que la consideración de un nuevo agente económico, caracterizado por la perfectibilidad del conocimiento y de la voluntad, permite reintegrar de un modo natural la Economía con la moral; de ahí que la Economía no se pueda entender ya como la ciencia de los "puros medios". Una de las consecuencias de este planeamiento es la mejor comprensión del cambio y del aprendizaje económico

Early outcome of anatomical lung resection for non-small cell lung cancer in the elderly

OBJECTIVE Surgery is the mainstay of early-stage lung cancer treatment. However, since life expectancy is constantly increasing, we wanted to investigate whether this principle also applies to elderly (≥70-year-old) patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS We analyzed a prospectively maintained database on anatomical lung resections at our institute. Patients were divided in two groups: <70 years and ≥70 years (elderly). Outcome indicators were postoperative cardiopulmonary complications rate and 30-day readmission rate. Baseline and surgical characteristics were compared by mean of t-test, Mann-Whitney U test, chi2 and Fisher exact tests. Propensity score matching was performed to account for differences between groups in the outcome's analysis. RESULTS We selected 241 patients with lung cancer (2017-2021) who underwent anatomical lung resections. Median age was 70.5 (IQR: 64-76). 133 patients (54%) aged 70 and above. Patients and surgical characteristics (comorbidities, lung function, performance status, type and extension of lung resection and surgical approach) were similar among groups, except for atrial fibrillation (p=0.01) and previous cancer history (p<0.0001) which were more frequent in the elderly group. Non-elderly patients were more frequently active smokers (p<0.0001). Cardiopulmonary complications rate was 23%, 30-day readmission rate was 12.6%. We did not observe any significant difference in all the short-term outcome indicators between the elderly and the younger counterpart. Particularly, complications rate (p=0.91) and 30-day readmission (p=0.84) did not differ between groups. CONCLUSIONS In our series, short-term outcomes are not compromised in elderly patients. The evolution in surgical strategy and expertise contribute to offer surgical resection with curative intent for lung cancer to a large spectrum of patients

Not Waving but Striving: Research Collaboration in the Context of Stratification, Segmentation, and the Quest for Prestige

In this article we examine the ways in which institutional stratification and academic labor segmentation contribute to shaping faculty collaborative activities. We draw on interviews from science and engineering faculty at two institutions in the United States to highlight how collaboration, as an essential form of academic labor, is shaped by institutional factors like resource stress and isomorphic pressures to fit the ideal of the “world-class” research-intensive university. The findings suggest that a university’s relative position in the institutional status hierarchy has a significant impact on the types of resources faculty seeking to establish collaborations can access and mobilize, thus reinforcing existing patterns of institutional stratification where “striving” institutions can never catch up to their more prestigious peers. At the same time, the pressure to maximize institutional prestige can create paradoxical interinstitutional dynamics where seemingly successful “Mode 2” units that rely almost exclusively on external resources and partnerships with industry are expected to mold themselves more closely to the activity streams of traditional academic units

Bi-allelic Variants in METTL5 Cause Autosomal-Recessive Intellectual Disability and Microcephaly

Contains fulltext : 208970.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Exploring Relationships between Demersal Resources and Environmental Factors in the Ionian Sea (Central Mediterranean)

The relationships between the abundance of demersal resources, environmental variables, and fishing pressure in the north-western Ionian Sea in the last two decades were evaluated. Data on the density collected during seventeen trawl surveys carried out from 1985 to 2005 were used. The following species were considered:Aristaeomorpha foliacea, Nephrops norvegicus,andParapenaeus longirostrisfor crustaceans;Merluccius merluccius, Phycis blennoides,andMullus barbatusfor teleost fish. The recruitment index was also considered forN. norvegicus, P. longirostris, M. merlucciusandMullus barbatus. Six candidate models were evaluated for each density and recruitment data set either combining fishing effort with global (NAO) and regional (SST and precipitation) climatic indices, or models separately involving fishing effort, NAO, or regional climatic indices as the only predictive variable. Model selection was carried out using an information-theoretical approach that applies Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC). High changes over time were observed for the density data and recruitment indices in each species. Apart from hake abundance and recruitment data, for which a clear positive relationship with the NAO index alone was detected, the changes observed in the other species seem to be the consequence of the interaction between bottom-up effects linked to changes in physical environment and top-down ones due to the fishing pressure