The Paris Game: Charles de Gaulle, the Liberation of Paris, and the Gamble that Won France (Book Review) by Ray Argyle

Review of The Paris Game: Charles de Gaulle, the Liberation of Paris, and the Gamble that Won France by Ray Argyl

Causality between Energy and Economic Growth: the Italian case

The causal relationship between economic growth and energy consumption represents a widely studied topic in energy economics literature. Although it is very well known that there is a strong correlation between energy use and growth, the issue of causality still remains to be answered. This study aims to investigate the possibility of the energydemand- led growth and growth-driven energy demand hypotheses in Italy by testing the causality between real GDP and electric power consumption through an ECM model. Results do not reveal any causality linkage.Causality; Economic growth; Energy Consumption

INNOVATIONS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: NEOCLASSICAL VERSUS EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

In the last 20 years, the concept of ‘Sustainable Development’ (SD) has become very popular and wide spread in the world. In particular, the environmental dimension of SD asks for new ways to accomplish enhanced quality of life with reduced environmental impact. As a consequence, innovations that contribute to sustainable path ways through an improved environmental quality (the so-called ‘Sustainable Innovations’ - SI s) are facing a growing interest. The present study aims at contributing to the debate about innovation and SD, by focusing on the analysis of SIs from, respectively, the neoclassical and the evolutionary perspective. Whereas neoclassical theorists neoclassical theorists focus on the ‘double externality problem’ of SIs, on the one hand, and on the factors that influence the irimplementation, on the other, evolutionary approach analyses mainly radical technological changes thus stressing the need for a consideration of additional aspects ( in particular social and institutional ones) in the analysis of SIs.Innovations, Sustainable Development, Neoclassical Theory, Evolutionary Approach

Climatic differences and Economic Growth across Italian Provinces: First Empirical Evidence

The purpose of this study consists in verifying if climatic differences can help to explain the different economic growths path across Italian provinces. Focusing on literature on economic convergence on one hand, and that on economics of climate on the other, the work depicts how climatic variables can enter into the traditional Solows neoclassical growth model developing two alternative models. Afterwards, it tests whether climatic characteristics actually exert an influence on economic convergence using an original climate dataset composed by average yearly min and max temperatures (C), humidity grade (%), number of frost-days and annual precipitations (mm) for 58 Italian Provinces uniformly distributed over the Peninsula. The results, obtained through the Arellano-Bond GMM estimator, show how some of climatic variables employed in this study actually affect the level of Provincial income.Climate; Economic growth; Convergence; Italian Provinces

Deep Learning Solutions for TanDEM-X-based Forest Classification

In the last few years, deep learning (DL) has been successfully and massively employed in computer vision for discriminative tasks, such as image classification or object detection. This kind of problems are core to many remote sensing (RS) applications as well, though with domain-specific peculiarities. Therefore, there is a growing interest on the use of DL methods for RS tasks. Here, we consider the forest/non-forest classification problem with TanDEM-X data, and test two state-of-the-art DL models, suitably adapting them to the specific task. Our experiments confirm the great potential of DL methods for RS applications

Bell's inequality violation due to misidentification of spatially non stationary random processes

Correlations for the Bell gedankenexperiment are constructed using probabilities given by quantum mechanics, and nonlocal information. They satisfy Bell's inequality and exhibit spatial non stationarity in angle. Correlations for three successive local spin measurements on one particle are computed as well. These correlations also exhibit non stationarity, and satisfy the Bell inequality. In both cases, the mistaken assumption that the underlying process is wide-sense-stationary in angle results in violation of Bell's inequality. These results directly challenge the wide-spread belief that violation of Bell's inequality is a decisive test for nonlocality.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Vertical spillovers from multinational enterprises: Does technological gap matter?

Foreign direct investment (FDI) from Multinational enterprises (MNEs) can augment the productivity of domestic firms insofar as knowledge “spills over” from foreign investors to local producers. The capacity of local companies to exploit knowledge from MNEs can be affected by the technology gap between foreign and local enterprises at both horizontal (in the same industry) and vertical (in different industries) level. Whereas most of the empirical literature has focused exclusively on the analysis of horizontal and backward spillovers (i.e. between MNEs and local suppliers), the present paper also examines the relationship between FDI-related spillovers and technological gap in the Italian manufacturing sector at forward level (i.e. between MNEs and local buyers). Results suggest that at both intra-industry and forward level, the technological gap is of considerable importance for the spillover effect, particularly in the case of low-medium gap

Exact solution of the 1D Hubbard model in the atomic limit with inter-site magnetic coupling

In this paper we present for the first time the exact solution in the narrow-band limit of the 1D extended Hubbard model with nearest-neighbour spin-spin interactions described by an exchange constant J. An external magnetic field h is also taken into account. This result has been obtained in the framework of the Green's functions formalism, using the Composite Operator Method. By means of this theoretical background, we have studied some relevant features such as double occupancy, magnetization, spin-spin and charge-charge correlation functions and derived a phase diagram for both ferro (J>0) and anti-ferro (J<0) coupling in the limit of zero temperature. We also report a study on density of states, specific heat, charge and spin susceptibilities. In the limit of zero temperature, we show that the model exhibits a very rich phase diagram characterized by different magnetic orders and by the coexistence of charge and spin orderings at commensurate filling. Moreover, our analysis at finite temperature of density of states and response functions shows the presence of low-temperature charge and spin excitations near the phase boundaries.Comment: 20 pages, 32 figure