The value of flexible contracts; evidence from an italian panel of industrial firms

Since the mid-1980s fixed-term contracts have been used in many European countries to reduce firing costs. As this strategy may have led to segmented labour markets, recent policy interventions have enhanced permanent jobs by cutting their labour costs. Efficient design of these policies requires knowledge of the costs associated with employment protection legislation. In this paper we evaluate these costs by measuring firmsÂ’ willingness to trade fixed-term for open-ended contracts in exchange for a cut in the labour cost of permanent jobs. Our results are based on a panel of Italian firms in the engineering sector whose labour costs were reduced by a tax credit granted to firms hiring workers on open-ended rather than fixed-term contracts. The trade-off is identified by comparing how the composition of recruitment by type of contract changed for firms that received the tax credit and those that did not. Potential distortions due to self-selection into the programme, firm-specific timevarying shocks or mechanical correlation induced by the selection rule into the programme, are accounted for by estimating the spurious effect of the tax credit in the years when it was not in force. Estimation is carried out in both a parametric and non-parametric setting that uses p-score to control for different probabilities of receiving the tax credit. We found that firms value the possibility of hiring one per cent new workers on a fixed-term contract as much as a cut in the labour cost of an open-ended worker in the range of 1.3-2.8 per cent. This result helps to explain recent employment growth in Italy, where the share of fixed-term contracts among new hires grew from 34 to 42 per cent between 1995 and 2003. Using our most conservative results, we evaluate that the labour cost reduction associated with this expansion amounted to anything between 10.4 and 22.4 per cent. Given the elasticity of employment to wages, the advent of flexibility in the Italian labour market can account for a large share, between 37 and 80 per cent, of employment growth in the private sector.tax credit, open-end contracts, fixed-term contracts, firing costs

Please ... . draw me a Software Engineer

The objectives of this short paper are to dream about software engineering science and to think about making this dream alive. In my dream, there are no more software engineers but senseware engineers that build physical space and time augmentations that adapt to human direct and indirect needs. Making this dream alive could be started by providing research and development directions that might make this dream a reached target. Anyhow, it is an awaken-dream which is made and it is mainly synthesized from the author\u27s experience in research and development of software engineering. Moving from today\u27s software engineering nightmare in which What You Get Is What You Get to a dreamed world in which What I Get Is What I Need needs to turn science-fiction into science-vision

Regulation of gene expression in human brain using transcriptome sequencing

Characterising the molecular mechanisms underlying disease risk variants identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is of major interest. Expression Quantitative Trait Loci (eQTL) mapping studies provide a genome-wide characterisation of the impact of common genetic variation on gene expression and splicing and therefore have the potential to achieve this. In this thesis, I investigated the effect of common genetic variants in human brain through eQTL analysis. As part of the UK Brain Expression Consortium project, the analyses in this PhD thesis were performed on whole transcriptome RNA sequencing data from neuropathologically normal human post-mortem brain. I conducted eQTL analyses on putamen and substantia nigra using different types of quantification in order to interrogate regulation at different stages of RNA processing. This analysis pointed to splicing as an important process for the pathogenesis of Parkison’s Disease. Thus, I identify not only disease-relevant regulatory loci but also the types of analyses yielding the most disease-specific information. Due to the limitations of current gene annotation and the complex transcriptomic landscape in human brain, I investigated transcription and splicing in the hippocampus using annotation-agnostic methods. This not only revealed the existence of widespread gene misannotation in the human brain, but also revealed the limitation of current quantification methods to capture transcriptome complexity in brain. Therefore, a reference-free eQTL analysis was performed and by testing for eQTL-GWAS co-localisation I found that incomplete annotation of the brain transcriptome limits the interpretation of risk loci for neurological disorders. I anticipate that analyses of this kind will have an increasing impact on our understanding of a range of disorders, but are likely to have most impact on neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders because of the high transcriptome complexity of human brain tissue

Regulation of surface expression of the T lymphocyte differentiation antigen, CD8

The murine T lymphocyte glycoprotein CDS is a disulphide bonded heterodimer, composed of αβ or α'β chains, which plays a critical role in regulating the antigen responses of class I MHC-restricted T cells. CDS must interact not only with its ligand, class I MHC, on antigen-expressing target cells, but also with other proteins on the surface of the T ceil itself, such as the antigen-specific T cell receptor. In the present study two additional molecules, of 26 kD and 29 kD molecular weight, associated with the CDS complex have been identified and characterised. The 26 kD molecule is a novel polypeptide preferentially associated with the "immature" forms of CDS (α'β and β alone) and is only found within the cell. The data presented suggest that the 26 kD molecular weight protein may be involved in the developmentally regulated transport of CD8. The second molecule, of 29 kD molecular weight, is found on the cell surface of mature and immature T cells. This molecule appears to be another form of the CD8β polypeptide, with the major difference being the presence of variable amounts of sialic acid. The extent of this sialylation correlates not only with the differentiation status of the T cell but also with its state of activation. The changes in levels of sialic acid may have a significant influence on how CD8 interacts with other molecules. This is the first clear indication of a possible role for the CD8β chain, as previous evidence of CD8 function has been correlated exclusively with the CD8α chain

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In this paper we look at tax credit policy as an instrument to foster hiring with open-end rather than with fixed-term contracts. In particular, we examine a specific regulation adopted in Italy in the year 2000 (Credito d’Imposta). This policy offers a generous and automatic tax credit to all firms hiring workers with open-end contracts. The eligibility criteria are very mild for both firms and workers. Our results seem to indicate, both formally and empirically, that firms used this subsidy to hire under open-end contracts primarily those workers who would have been hired under such a contract regardless the subsidy, even though after a short transition into temporary employment. Our estimates suggest that, compared to 2000, in 2001 the subsidy did not increase the overall probability to be hired, but changed the composition of new employees. It increased the chances to find an open-end contract but in a rather uneven way across workers. Conditional on being hired, the probability rose by about 10 per cent for workers holding a college degree, by about 4 per cent for people with a high school diploma, while did no