"The Look of Stagniation: Romania's Erratic Transition"

A transition path is expected to lead, eventually, to economic performance and sectoral structure typical of market economies. This twofold result would issue from a complex resource re-allocation process, almost automatically igniting a new mechanism of accumulation and growth. Romania's experience of persistent fluctuations around a descending trend, however, seems to contradict such notion of the one-way, self-fuelling path. It causes us to rethink some of the analytical tools and theories economists are using everyday. In this paper, I will offer the reflections of an academician together with, hopefully, some more practical suggestions. My main point is that an analysis focusing solely upon resource re-allocation mechanisms cannot fully account for Romania's erratic transition because it tends to miss the link with the dual processes of accumulation and creation of new resources. I will, therefore, reconstruct the "other side" of Romania's story by looking at its dynamic structure, described by the distribution of the economy's sectoral paths. The evolution over time of such distribution is the key to understanding the two issues of macroeconomic vulnerability and the non-sustainability of the country's current situation. Thus, the dynamics of Romania's economy is treated as a specimen of an independent variety of transition. It is one that not only proves unable to initialise and then sustain long-term growth; it seems to actually absorb and destroy more resources than it creates, in this way generating a slow agony from time to time interrupted sudden bursts of activity. The term dynamic trap is meant to describe such a repeating pattern of wild fluctuations around a contracting trend. Due partly to the short time horizon and data availability, the conclusions of the foregoing analysis can only be tentative. Still, they clearly point out the need to re-consider policy for Romania and similar countries. In particular, measures are required to put in place and to enhance mechanisms of technology transfers, to re-orient sectoral composition that generates trade specialization, and generally to create conditions for an accelerated process of accumulation of physical as well as human capital assets. The economic environment in such countries seems unable to process macroeconomic policies in the expected way.

Interchange reconnection in a turbulent Corona

Magnetic reconnection at the interface between coronal holes and loops, so-called interchange reconnection, can release the hotter, denser plasma from magnetically confined regions into the heliosphere, contributing to the formation of the highly variable slow solar wind. The interchange process is often thought to develop at the apex of streamers or pseudo-streamers, near Y and X-type neutral points, but slow streams with loop composition have been recently observed along fanlike open field lines adjacent to closed regions, far from the apex. However, coronal heating models, with magnetic field lines shuffled by convective motions, show that reconnection can occur continuously in unipolar magnetic field regions with no neutral points: photospheric motions induce a magnetohydrodynamic turbulent cascade in the coronal field that creates the necessary small scales, where a sheared magnetic field component orthogonal to the strong axial field is created locally and can reconnect. We propose that a similar mechanism operates near and around boundaries between open and closed regions inducing a continual stochastic rearrangement of connectivity. We examine a reduced magnetohydrodynamic model of a simplified interface region between open and closed corona threaded by a strong unipolar magnetic field. This boundary is not stationary, becomes fractal, and field lines change connectivity continuously, becoming alternatively open and closed. This model suggests that slow wind may originate everywhere along loop-coronal hole boundary regions, and can account naturally and simply for outflows at and adjacent to such boundaries and for the observed diffusion of slow wind around the heliospheric current sheet.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 movie, ApJ Letters (accepted

A new methodology for modelling urban soundscapes: a psychometric revisitation of the current standard and a Bayesian approach for individual response prediction

Measuring how the urban sound environment is perceived by public space users, which is usually referred as urban soundscape, is a research field of particular in terest for a broad and multidisciplinary scientific community besides private and public agencies. The need for a tool to quantify soundscapes would provide much support to urban planning and design, so to public healthcare. Soundscape liter ature still does not show a unique strategy for addressing this topic. Soundscape definition, data collection, and analysis tools have been recently standardised and published in three respective ISO (International Organisation for Standardization) items. In particular, the third item of the ISO series defines the calculation of the soundscape experience of public space users by means of multiple Likert scales. In this thesis, with regards to the third item of the soundscape ISO series, the soundscape data analysis standard method is questioned and a correction paradigm is proposed. This thesis questiones the assumption of a point-wise superimposition match across the Likert scales used during the soundscape assessment task. In order to do that, the thesis presents a new method which introduces correction values, or metric, for adjusting the scales in accordance to the results of common scaling behaviours found across the investigated locations. In order to validate the results, the outcome of the new metric is used as tar get to predict the individual experience of soundscapes from the participants. In comparison to the current ISO output, the new correction values reveal to achievea better predictability in both linear and non-linear modelling by increasing the ac-curacy of prediction of individual responses up to 52.6% (8.3% higher than theaccuracy obtained with the standard method).Finally, the new metric is used to validate the collection of data samples acrossseveral locations on individual questionnaires responses. Models are trained, in aiterative way, on all the locations except the one used during the validation. Thisprocedure provides a strong validating framework for predicting individual subjectassessments belonging to locations totally unseen during the model training. The results show that the combination of the new metrics with the proposed modelling structure achieves good performance on individual responses across the dataset withan average accuracy above 54%. A new index for measuring the soundscape is fi-nally introduced based on the percentage of people agreeing on soundscape pleas-antness calculated from the new proposed metric and performing a r-squared valueequals to 0.87.The framework introduced is limited by cultural and linguistic factors. Indeed,different corrected metric space are expected to be found when data is collected from different countries or urban context. The current values found in this thesis areso expected to be valid in large British cities and eventually in international hub andcapital cities. In these scenarios the corrected metric would provide a more realisticand direction-invariant representation of how the urban soundscape is perceived compared to the current ISO tool, showing that some components in the circumplex model are perceived softer or stronger according to the dimension. Future research will need to understand better the limitations of this new ramework and to extendand compare it towards different urban, cultural, and linguistic contexts

Choice modelling embedded in marketing relationships

Continuation versus defection decisions are rarely a neutral process for consumers. Although previous research has recognized the key role of emotions in such process, it has not directly formulated models of choice based on affective constructs. This dissertation develops and empirically tests such model using discrete choice experimental data. The conceptual model incorporates sellers’ extra effort and work (e.g., adaptation of policies, provision of small favors or considerations) into a traditional choice model, and shows how such efforts unfold in consumer black box as well as influences behavioral outcomes. Specifically, I propose that benefits received throughout interpersonal interactions create a self-other trade-off, which is processed by a specific social-emotional process. Across three studies, the dissertation demonstrates that the social-emotional process mediates the effect of seller efforts on defection utility, and such process is activated only when benefits are received thought interpersonal interactions. Also, the current results demonstrate that the role of emotions on preferences is highly malleable, that is, the same social emotion can both promote or inhibit defection behaviors. Overall, the work offers theoretical insights and methodological guidelines for research on the role of emotions on choice situations. In particular, marketing research should avoid claiming fixed relations between discrete emotions and consumer preferences or prioritize more valenced-based approaches in discrete choice frameworks.Decisões que envolvem continuação versus deserção raramente são um processo neutro para os consumidores. Embora pesquisas anteriores tenham reconhecido o papel fundamental das emoções em tal processo, elas não formularam diretamente modelos de escolha baseados em construtos afetivos. Esta tese desenvolve e testa empiricamente tal modelo usando dados experimentais de escolha discreta. O modelo conceitual incorpora o esforço e trabalho extra dos vendedores (p.ex., adaptação de políticas, provisão de pequenos favores ou considerações) em um modelo de escolha tradicional, e mostra como tais esforços se desdobram dentro da caixa preta do consumidor, bem como influenciam os resultados comportamentais. Especificamente, é proposto que os benefícios recebidos ao longo das interações interpessoais criam um trade-off entre “Eu” e “Outro”, o qual é avaliado por um processo socioemocional específico. Através de três estudos, a dissertação demonstra que o processo socioemocional medeia o efeito dos esforços do vendedor na utilidade da deserção, e tal processo é ativado apenas quando os benefícios são recebidos por meio de interações interpessoais. Além disso, os resultados demonstram que o papel das emoções nas preferências em situações de escolha é altamente maleável, ou seja, a mesma emoção social pode promover ou inibir comportamentos de deserção. No geral, o trabalho oferece insights teóricos e diretrizes metodológicas para a pesquisa sobre o papel das emoções em situações de escolha. Em particular, a pesquisa em marketing deve evitar alegar relações fixas entre emoções específicas e preferências do consumidor ou priorizar abordagens mais baseadas em valência em análises de escolha discreta