The International Labour Organization and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919-2009

[Excerpt] This book explores some of the main ideas which the ILO has seized, developed and applied, examines their history and tells how they were pursued in different geographical and historical settings. And, since the ILO revolves around ideas, that helps us understand why the ILO has sometimes thrived, sometimes suffered, but always survived and persisted to pursue its goals through the political and economic upheavals of the last 90 years

Is distance dying at last? Falling home bias in fixed effects models of patent citations

We examine the “home bias” of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen over time, as we would expect from the dramatic fall in communication and travel costs. Our proposed estimator controls for correlated fixed effects and censoring in duration models and we apply it to data on over two million citations between 1975 and 1999. Home bias declines substantially when we control for fixed effects: there is practically no home bias for the more “modern” sectors such as pharmaceuticals and information/communication technologies

On-line dynamic monitoring of the SHARON process for sustainable nitrogen removal from wastewater

The goal of this work is the development of a suitable monitoring module, which is to be the first module of an integrated fault detection and control system for the SHARON process. To model the process properly, different PCA models lire tested. As a first step, PCA is used in an iterative manner to exclude data not considered to represent normal operational conditions and process behaviour from the original data set. To improve the performance of the identified model, it is decided to account for dynamics in the SHARON process by means of auto-regressive exogenous (ARX) Structuring of data before the identification. A fruitful replacement of missing values for this purpose is done by means of a static PCA model. It is shown that the different criteria used in model selection lead to the same DPCA model. In this paper all steps of the monitoring module design are explained and the performance of different models is analyzed