Reforming the Liberal Welfare State : International Shocks, Unemployment and Household Income Shares

We would like to thank Suresh Chand Aggarwal, Deb Kusum Das, Wendy Li and participants at the IARIW 34th General Conference, Dresden, Gaaitzen de Vries, Marcel Timmer and seminar participants at Groningen, Holger Görg, Fredrik Sjöholm, and John Skåtun for useful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the NORFACE ERA-NET (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe Network) Welfare State Futures Programme, Grant Number 462-14-120. The usual disclaimer applies.Publisher PD

Onward migration: an introduction

In August 2016, Maslax Moxamed, a 19-year-old man from Somalia, arrived in Italy. He spent two months in Rome, first in via Cupa in the San Lorenzo district, where he met volunteers at the Baobab experience, an occupied social centre that had been turned into a reception centre for migrants in 2015 at the height of the “refugee crisis” (Dines et al., 2018). After eviction in September 2016, he followed volunteers to the various makeshift reception points around the city. His migratory project does not, however, involve spending the rest of his life in Italy. He decides to move on and one evening in October takes a bus to Milan from Piazzale Tiburtino, from where he reaches Belgium with a Sudanese friend, Azou. However, on 31 January 2017, he landed again at Rome's Fiumicino airport. The Belgian authorities sent him back to Italy as a result of the Dublin regulation, European legislation which states that asylum applications are examined by the first country of entry. ..

Health challenges in refugee reception: dateline Europe 2016

The arrival of more than one million migrants, many of them refugees, has proved a major test for the European Union. Although international relief and monitoring agencies have been critical of makeshift camps in Calais and Eidomeni where infectious disease and overcrowding present major health risks, few have examined the nature of the official reception system and its impact on health delivery. Drawing upon research findings from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, this article considers the physical and mental health of asylum-seekers in transit and analyses how the closure of borders has engendered health risks for populations in recognised reception centres in Sicily and in Greece. Data gathered by means of a survey administered in Greece (300) and in Sicily (400), and complemented by in-depth interviews with migrants (45) and key informants (50) including representatives of government offices, humanitarian and relief agencies, NGOs and activist organisations, are presented to offer an analysis of the reception systems in the two frontline states. We note that medical provision varies significantly from one centre to another and that centre managers play a critical role in the transmission of vital information. A key finding is that, given such disparity, the criteria used by the UNHCR to grade health services reception do not address the substantive issue that prevent refugees from accessing health services, even when provided on site. Health provision is not as recorded in UNHCR reporting but rather there are critical gaps between provision, awareness, and access for refugees in reception systems in Sicily and in Greece. This article concludes that there is a great need for more information campaigns to direct refugees to essential services

Hamiltonian and Potentials in Derivative Pricing Models: Exact Results and Lattice Simulations

The pricing of options, warrants and other derivative securities is one of the great success of financial economics. These financial products can be modeled and simulated using quantum mechanical instruments based on a Hamiltonian formulation. We show here some applications of these methods for various potentials, which we have simulated via lattice Langevin and Monte Carlo algorithms, to the pricing of options. We focus on barrier or path dependent options, showing in some detail the computational strategies involved.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures 1 subsection added (4.1). Slightly longer appendi

Intensification of production, low emission pathways and sustainable strategies for backyard, layer and broiler chickens

Meat and eggs produced by chickens represent an important economic resource in many economies. In future, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by chickens will increase due to greater food demand. This study analyses the GHG emissions of chickens and identifies sustainable policy strategies for production intensification and GHG reduction. It advances beyond previous studies by combining GHG reduction and improving meat and egg production rather than reporting mitigation options only, and can thus provide low-emission pathways. The contemporaneous intensification of chicken production and GHG emission reduction are feasible for broiler, layer and backyard chickens in Moldova. For farmers, this important goal can be achieved by using feeds of good quality and high digestibility. An efficient utilization of feeds for backyard chickens (by a dietary replacement of 10% dry matter (DM) intake of fresh grass with 10% DM intake of barley) had the effect of reducing the total emissions to 78179, 79682 and 81238 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent/year (t CO2-eq/year), increasing meat production to 2376, 2422 and 2469 t carcass weight/year and increasing egg production (in shell) to 47846, 48793, and 49741 t eggs/year with an increase of chickens of 2%, 6% and 10% per year, respectively. Policymakers can do a great deal to support the abatement of chicken emissions by developing long-term strategies, and regulations that are aimed towards mitigation targets and technologies. To effectively maximize emission reduction and increase production, however, policymakers must overcome the existing national barriers.Keywords: feed, greenhouse gas, manure, mitigation, polic

Simulation of the process e+e−↦e+e−γe^+ e^- \mapsto e^+ e^- \gamma within electroweak theory with longitudinally polarized initial electrons

We present simple analytic expressions for the distributions of the Bhabha scattering process with emission of one hard photon, including weak boson exchanges, and with longitudinal polarization of the initial electron. The results from the Monte Carlo generator BHAGEN-1PH, based on these expressions, are presented and compared, for the unpolarized case, with those existing in literature.Comment: 9 pages, plain Tex, no figures, small change in Table

Software process improvement behavior of small and medium organizations in Argentina

Este artículo reporta el trabajo de investigación realizado en base a datos extraídos de la Encuesta Anual realizada por la CESSI durante el año 2007 entre organizaciones dedicadas al desarrollo de Software en Argentina. Si bien la temática de mejora de procesos de software há sido investigada previamente muy pocos datos existen sobe el comportamiento de organizaciones en Argentina. El análisis realizado contribuye a la comprensión del perfil de las organizaciones en cuanto a las tendencias de Mejora de Procesos de Software, las motivaciones que las movilizan y los facilitadores de estas iniciativas. Las conclusiones pueden ser utilizadas para entender que facilitadores mejoran la adopción de iniciativas de mejora por parte de organizaciones PyME de forma que incrementen su competitividad en los mercados domésticos y off-shoreThis paper reports on a research work performed on data extracted from the 2007 Annual CESSI survey among Argentina software development organizations. Although SPI has been researched before little data exists about the behavior of organizations in Argentina. The analysis provides insights on the profile of the companies regarding Software Process Improvement (SPI) trends, their motivations and drivers. The conclusions can be used to understand what drivers facilitate SPI adoption by SME organizations in order to increase their competitiveness in domestic and off-shore markets.Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (WISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

The optogenetic revolution in cerebellar investigations

The cerebellum is most renowned for its role in sensorimotor control and coordination, but a growing number of anatomical and physiological studies are demonstrating its deep involvement in cognitive and emotional functions. Recently, the development and refinement of optogenetic techniques boosted research in the cerebellar field and, impressively, revolutionized the methodological approach and endowed the investigations with entirely new capabilities. This translated into a significant improvement in the data acquired for sensorimotor tests, allowing one to correlate single-cell activity with motor behavior to the extent of determining the role of single neuronal types and single connection pathways in controlling precise aspects of movement kinematics. These levels of specificity in correlating neuronal activity to behavior could not be achieved in the past, when electrical and pharmacological stimulations were the only available experimental tools. The application of optogenetics to the investigation of the cerebellar role in higher-order and cognitive functions, which involves a high degree of connectivity with multiple brain areas, has been even more significant. It is possible that, in this field, optogenetics has changed the game, and the number of investigations using optogenetics to study the cerebellar role in non-sensorimotor functions in awake animals is growing. The main issues addressed by these studies are the cerebellar role in epilepsy (through connections to the hippocampus and the temporal lobe), schizophrenia and cognition, working memory for decision making, and social behavior. It is also worth noting that optogenetics opened a new perspective for cerebellar neurostimulation in patients (e.g., for epilepsy treatment and stroke rehabilitation), promising unprecedented specificity in the targeted pathways that could be either activated or inhibited