Universities and economically depressed regions: how strong is the influence of the University of Évora in the regional human capital?

Universities are a source of significant multiplier effects upon local and regional economic activity. In the case of economically depressed regions, the importance of universities is enhanced. This is the case of the University of Évora, located in Alentejo (Portugal), one of the poorest EU regions, where it has been a key element to the dynamics of local economic activity. Apart from a direct impact upon the economic activity of Alentejo, the University of Évora has also been promoting demographic effects, both by encouraging new permanent residents to the area, and also by attracting a fluctuating mass of students which usually become residents during the period of time required to obtain their degrees. In this paper a population of former University of Évora students is analysed with the objective of answering questions related to their connections with the city of Évora, and its surrounding areas, after graduation, and also to analyse their impact upon the regional economic activity and their contribution to the improvement of the regional labour force. The University of Évora is also assessed from the perspective of its relationships with other regional agents, in terms of knowledge and innovation transference. It is concluded that one of the main contributions of the University of Évora to the regional economic activity occurs via the employment of its graduates in local and regional schools, enterprises and other institutions. KEY-WORDS: Human Capital, Regional Development, Universities JEL CLASSIFICATION: O15, O18, R12

Positive Entropy Through Pointwise Dynamics

We define some pointwise properties of topological dynamical systems and give pointwise conditions for such a system possesses positive topological entropy. We give sufficient conditions to obtain positive topological entropy for maps which are approximated by maps with the shadowing property in a uniform way.Comment: 8 page

Interactive Unawareness Revisited

We analyze a model of interactive unawareness introduced by Heifetz, Meier and Schipper (HMS). We consider two axiomatizations for their model, which capture different notions of validity. These axiomatizations allow us to compare the HMS approach to both the standard (S5) epistemic logic and two other approaches to unawareness: that of Fagin and Halpern and that of Modica and Rustichini. We show that the differences between the HMS approach and the others are mainly due to the notion of validity used and the fact that the HMS is based on a 3-valued propositional logic.Comment: 26 page

Characterizing the NP-PSPACE Gap in the Satisfiability Problem for Modal Logic

There has been a great of work on characterizing the complexity of the satisfiability and validity problem for modal logics. In particular, Ladner showed that the validity problem for all logics between K, T, and S4 is {\sl PSPACE}-complete, while for S5 it is {\sl NP}-complete. We show that, in a precise sense, it is \emph{negative introspection}, the axiom \neg K p \rimp K \neg K p, that causes the gap. In a precise sense, if we require this axiom, then the satisfiability problem is {\sl NP}-complete; without it, it is {\sl PSPACE}-complete.Comment: 6 page

Universities and economically depressed regions: how ‘attractive’ is the University of Évora?

As it is well known, universities constitute sources of important multiplier effects on the economic activity of the regions where they are located. Plainly, in the case of economically depressed regions, the importance of universities becomes higher. This is certainly the case with the University of Évora as being located in the Alentejo, one of the poorest regions at the European Union level, it have been contributing to the attraction of economic activity. Besides the direct effect on the economic activity of the Alentejo, the University of Évora also have been exerting demographic effects, on the one hand, by allowing people to become residents on the region and, on the other hand, by attracting students which normally become residents during the period of time required to conclude their academic degrees. The paper explores this last effect by the analysis of how and why the University of Évora is chosen by students coming from all over the country (and from abroad). This analysis, which is done through the use of econometric techniques, also indicates which are the decisive factors for the attraction exerted by the University of Évora, in general, and by its degree courses, in particular, on the candidate students. KEYWORDS: Decision Analysis, Discrete Choice Models, Portugal, Universities JEL CLASSIFICATION: C21, R12, R23

Regional limits in Portugal - an application of cluster analysis

In 1989, Portugal has adopted the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) of the European Union (EU) to promote statistical normalisation in the EU. This classification grouped the portuguese municipalities in three levels: NUTS III (28 units in the Mainland), NUTS II (5 units in the Mainland) and NUTS I (3 units: Mainland, Madeira Islands and Azores Islands). In 2002, the Portuguese government approved a law introducing some modifications to the former nomenclature, namely in the regions of Centro, Lisboa e Vale do Tejo and Alentejo. Further to these modifications, some NUTS III units were moved from Lisboa e Vale do Tejo (new designation is Lisboa) to Centro and Alentejo. In this paper we group territorial units, following the methodology of cluster analysis, making use of official statistics like the population census of 2001. Our goal is to obtain homogenous NUTS II in economic and social terms, therefore challenging the 2002 nomenclature modifications. We select our variables to characterise the territorial units, according to the competitiveness territorial pyramid (Mateus et al., 2000), which classifies the territorial analysis by themes like demography, labour market, workers qualifications, innovation, entrepreneurship, productive specialization and infrastructures to support production.

Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness

Awareness has been shown to be a useful addition to standard epistemic logic for many applications. However, standard propositional logics for knowledge and awareness cannot express the fact that an agent knows that there are facts of which he is unaware without there being an explicit fact that the agent knows he is unaware of. We propose a logic for reasoning about knowledge of unawareness, by extending Fagin and Halpern's \emph{Logic of General Awareness}. The logic allows quantification over variables, so that there is a formula in the language that can express the fact that ``an agent explicitly knows that there exists a fact of which he is unaware''. Moreover, that formula can be true without the agent explicitly knowing that he is unaware of any particular formula. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic, using standard axioms from the literature to capture the quantification operator. Finally, we show that the validity problem for the logic is recursively enumerable, but not decidable.Comment: 32 page