Inequality of Opportunity in the Labour Market Entry of Graduates in Italy

The aim of the study is to test for equality of opportunity at the en- try into the national labour market of Italian graduates. By using an Italian survey data on the transition from university to work, we focus on the probability to get a job within three years from the graduation, and we find significant differences across individuals with different family background. In an attempt to explain whether these differences refiect op- portunity inequality, we adopt the Gomulka-Stern decomposition method. This method allows us to decompose differences in the probability to find a job between groups of people with different family background into two additive components. The first component can be attributed to differ- ences between groups in the distribution of individualsfi characteristics. The second component is a residual difference which can be attributed to opportunity inequality under the assumption that there is no unobserved heterogeneity between groups. In the presence of unobserved heterogene- ity, this residual component gives us a biased estimation for the difference in probability explained by opportunity inequality.Inequality of Opportunity, Higher Education, Gomulka-Stern Decomposition.

Information entropy and dark energy evolution

The information entropy is here investigated in the context of early and late cosmology under the hypothesis that distinct phases of universe evolution are entangled between them. The approach is based on the \emph{entangled state ansatz}, representing a coarse-grained definition of primordial \emph{dark temperature} associated to an \emph{effective entangled energy density}. The dark temperature definition comes from assuming either Von Neumann or linear entropy as sources of cosmological thermodynamics. We interpret the involved information entropies by means of probabilities of forming structures during cosmic evolution. Following this recipe, we propose that quantum entropy is simply associated to the thermodynamical entropy and we investigate the consequences of our approach using the adiabatic sound speed. As byproducts, we analyze two phases of universe evolution: the late and early stages. To do so, we first recover that dark energy reduces to a pure cosmological constant, as zero-order entanglement contribution, and second that inflation is well-described by means of an effective potential. In both cases, we infer numerical limits which are compatible with current observations.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur