ELECTORAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND THE COST OF UNPOPULARITY

When considering electoral campaigns, candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding. To offset this unpopularity effect, politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters, or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate. Our model predicts that the first effect dominates, and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity. By using U.S. House elections data and different identification strategies, we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions

Social service and disability in immigrant families: professionals views and strategies

Immigrant families with a member with disability represent a social group particularly at risk: their vulnerability, in fact, depends on both the disability and the migration experience. The paper presents a research work starting from a scoping study (Arksey & O'Malley, 2005), realized by analysing 94 scientific works collected through Scopus with the aim of highlighting the specific problems which immigrant families with disabilities have to deal with, what to do and the culturally sensitive intervention strategies effectively used by the services. Often, they lack informal support networks, they have social and/or economic disadvantages, they do not know how the educational, social and health institutions work. Therefore, they live in a multi-problem situation that requires health and social services to activate personalized assistance that takes into account cultural difference. Results from a quanti-qualitative research study conducted in the context of the Adult Disability Service in Padova will be also presented

Experts, Conflicts of Interest, and the Controversial Role of Reputation

This paper studies the impact of reputation on the reporting strategy of experts that face conflicts of interest. The framework we propose applies to different settings involv- ing decision makers that rely on experts for making informed decisions, such as financial analysts and goverment agencies. We show that reputation has a non-monotonic effect on the degree of information revelation. In general, truthful revelation is more likely to occur when there is more uncertainty on an expert's ability. Furthermore, above a certain threshold, an increase in reputation always makes truthful revelation more difficult to achieve. Our results shed light on the relationship between the institutional features of the reporting environment and informational efficiency.

Do Campaign Finance Policies Really Improve Voters' Welfare?

In an electoral race, interest groups will be willing to finance political candidates’ campaigns in return for favors that are costly to voters. Starting from the empirical observation of split contributions, we develop a theoretical model of directly informative campaign advertising with rational voters. In this setting, interest groups that demand more favors are less likely to finance candidates to enhance their electoral prospects. We find that the only feasible Pareto improving policy involves providing specific limits and subsidies to each candidate. Unfortunately, this policy is very demanding in terms of information for the policy maker and always involves candidates providing favors to interest groups. We argue that bans on contributions without public subsidies may not be welfare improving, since they negatively affect the informational value of advertisements.Campaign Finance, Interest Groups, Elections, Welfare

Position reporting system using small satellites

A system able to provide position reporting and monitoring services for mobile applications represents a natural complement to the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation system. The system architecture is defined on the basis of the communications requirements derived by user needs, allowing maximum flexibility in the use of channel capacity, and a very simple and low cost terminal. The payload is sketched, outlining the block modularity and the use of qualified hardware. The global system capacity is also derived. The spacecraft characteristics are defined on the basis of the payload requirements. A small bus optimized for Ariane IV, Delta II vehicles and based on the modularity concept is presented. The design takes full advantage of each launcher with a common basic bus or bus elements for a mass production

Tailoring the photonic bandgap of porous silicon dielectric mirror

A systematic method to fabricate porous silicon one dimensional photonic crystals has been engineered to have a photonic bandwidth up to 2000nm. The observation of the tailorability of the photonic bandgap (PBG) underscores the requirement of the large refractive index contrast for making broad PBG structures. In this letter, we present the fabrication and characteristics of such structures that may be promising structures for a large variety of applications.Comment: Published in Appl. Phys. Let

Monolithic whispering-gallery mode resonators with vertically coupled integrated bus waveguides

We report on the realization and optical characterization of a CMOS-compatible silicon-based microresonator/waveguide coupled system, fully integrated on a silicon chip. The device uses a vertical coupling scheme between the resonator and a buried strip waveguide. We demonstrate that its high optical quality follows from the accurate planarization of the waveguide topography. More importantly, we demonstrate a wafer-scale mass fabrication of freestanding planar resonators suspended in air and coupled to the integrated bus waveguides. A nanometer control of the coupling distances allows for a precise and selective excitation of different mode families of the resonator. This opens the door for the realization of stable all-integrated complex resonator systems for optomechanical and metrological applications, with the potential to substitute the nowadays intensive use of complicated fiber-taper coupling schemes.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Opposite effects of NO2_2 on electrical injection in porous silicon gas sensors

The electrical conductance of porous silicon fabricated with heavily doped p-type silicon is very sensitive to NO$_2$. A concentration of 10 ppb can be detected by monitoring the current injection at fixed voltage. However, we show that the sign of the injection variations depends on the porous layer thickness. If the thickness is sufficiently low -- of the order of few \micro\meter{} -- the injection decreases instead of increasing. We discuss the effect in terms of an already proposed twofold action of NO$_2$, according to which the free carrier density increases, and simultaneously the energy bands are bent at the porous silicon surface.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, requires SIunits packag