3,840 research outputs found
Social Protection and Human Capital: Test of a Hypothesis
The claim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between social protection and the investment in human capital. The idea is that investment in human capital is risky and therefore, as a prerequisite, needs some kind of protection as insurance. Investments in specific human capital, in particular, are very risky and require a special protection so as not to be avoided. An attempt is made to study the micro foundations of this relationship in depth which afterwards moves on to a macroeconomic analysis. Here a strong link is found between the levels and types of social protection and the skill profiles of a country (as predicted). The clusters we find seem to be in accordance with existing literature on âvarieties of capitalismâ. The last stage of this work is a hypothesis in the opposite direction of the nexus: how the choices of workers and firms influence the institutional framework (endogeneity of institutions of the welfare state). The result of this network of relations seems to be the formation of several organizational equilibria (and not a global convergence) in which institutions shape agentsâ behaviour and, at the same time, agents, through their policy preferences, reinforce existing institutional infrastructures.
Educational choices and the selection process before and after compulsory schooling
The aim of this paper is to analyze the selection process at work before and after compulsory schooling by assessing the determinants of school failures, dropouts and upper secondary school decisions of young Italians. The dataset is built combining individual data by the Labor Force Survey and aggregate data on local labor markets and school supply by the Italian National Statistic Institute and the Minister of Public Education, respectively. Our results show that school failure (i.e., repetition of a year) is highly correlated with the family background, and it strongly affects later choices. Early school leaving and the upper secondary school choice are mainly a reflection of the parentsâ socioeconomic status. The effectiveness of the educational system when narrowing the failure risk and the scholastic outflow relies on the widespread adoption of full-time attendance in compulsory school, the quality of the school infrastructures and the fewer teachers with temporary contracts.School failures, early dropout, school choice, social mobility, Italian education system
Analytical calculation of slip flow in lattice Boltzmann models with kinetic boundary conditions
We present a mathematical formulation of kinetic boundary conditions for
Lattice Boltzmann schemes in terms of reflection, slip, and accommodation
coefficients. It is analytically and numerically shown that, in the presence of
a non-zero slip coefficient, the Lattice Boltzmann flow develops a physical
slip flow component at the wall. Moreover, it is shown that the slip
coefficient can be tuned in such a way to recover quantitative agreement with
analytical and experimental results up to second order in the Knudsen number.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figure
The Z-index: A geometric representation of productivity and impact which accounts for information in the entire rank-citation profile
We present a simple generalization of Hirsch's h-index, Z =
\sqrt{h^{2}+C}/\sqrt{5}, where C is the total number of citations. Z is aimed
at correcting the potentially excessive penalty made by h on a scientist's
highly cited papers, because for the majority of scientists analyzed, we find
the excess citation fraction (C-h^{2})/C to be distributed closely around the
value 0.75, meaning that 75 percent of the author's impact is neglected.
Additionally, Z is less sensitive to local changes in a scientist's citation
profile, namely perturbations which increase h while only marginally affecting
C. Using real career data for 476 physicists careers and 488 biologist careers,
we analyze both the distribution of and the rank stability of Z with
respect to the Hirsch index h and the Egghe index g. We analyze careers
distributed across a wide range of total impact, including top-cited physicists
and biologists for benchmark comparison. In practice, the Z-index requires the
same information needed to calculate h and could be effortlessly incorporated
within career profile databases, such as Google Scholar and ResearcherID.
Because Z incorporates information from the entire publication profile while
being more robust than h and g to local perturbations, we argue that Z is
better suited for ranking comparisons in academic decision-making scenarios
comprising a large number of scientists.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
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