Relationships between Social Capital and regional development in Europe: a close examination

The study of the Social Capital and its relationships with the development is a topical subject. The theme has not an exactly definition yet. Some proofs at national and regional levels in Europe show interactions between the Social Capital and the economic growth and the labour market. From them, the paper aims to analyze these results, trying to specify the significances. Applying the Principal Components Analysis to several interesting single variables (coming from the European Values Survey database), some macro-variables were created and inserted in regressions, producing partial results. These macro-components summarize the elements of the Social Capital and they are broken down as single variables. A benchmarking between subjective variables and quantitative ones is realized to explain the concept of the Social Capital, with the aim of consider the individual and collective insight and the concrete effects of this multi-dimensional idea. To fulfill the analysis, a remark is faced on the relationships between the Social Capital and the development, as the causality between them deserves further examinations.

A Multi-Agent Model of Tax Evasion with Public Expenditure

We develop a model where heterogeneous agents maximize their individual utility based on (after tax) income and on the level of public expenditure (as in Cowell, Gordon, 1988). Agents are different in risk aversion and in the relative preference for public expenditure with respect to personal income. In each period, an agent can optimally conceal some income based on conjectures on the perceived probability of being subject to audits, the perceived level of public expenditure and the perceived amount of tax paid by other individuals. As far as the agent-based model is concerned, we assume that the Government sets the tax rate and the penalties, uses all the revenue to finance public expenditure (with no inefficiency) and fights evasion by controlling a (random) fraction of agents. We show that, through computational experiments based on micro-simulations, stable configurations of tax rates and public expenditure endogenously form in this case as well. In such equilibrium-like situations we find: • a positive relationship between the tax rate and evasion still arises. • tax compliance mainly depends on the distribution of personal features like risk-aversion and the degree of preference for public expenditure. • an endogenous level of tax evasion that is almost not affected by reasonable rates of control. A proper choice of the tax rate results instead in voluntary partial compliance. • the enforcement of higher compliance rates requires unrealistic and costly large-scale audits.Tax evasion, public expenditure, agent-based models

OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources, are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge1) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

From Strategic Planning to City Branding: Some Empirical Evidence in Italy

En un mundo global en el que los sitios compiten entre ellos, la imagen de la ciudad juega un papel crucial para atraer turistas e inversores, y para conseguir que los ciudadanos se queden satisfechos y evitar su desplazamiento. A través de la exploración de conexiones e implicaciones entre la teoria y los resultados empíricos obtenidos en varias ciudades italianas en relación a su atractivo para turistas e inversores, este artículo pretende ofrecer una útil visión general para académicos y profesionales. El objetivo es no sólo el de revisar la extensa literatura de la planificación estratégica en marketing y el proceso de marca de las ciudades, sino también es el de concentrarse específicamente en algunos casos italianos (Turín, Génova, Venecia y Piacenza), donde la aplicación de los instrumentos mencionados ha proporcionado resultados interesantes para comparar

Multimap targeted free energy estimation

We present a new method to compute free energies at a quantum mechanical (QM) level of theory from molecular simulations using cheap reference potential energy functions, such as force fields. To overcome the poor overlap between the reference and target distributions, we generalize targeted free energy perturbation (TFEP) to employ multiple configuration maps. While TFEP maps have been obtained before from an expensive training of a normalizing flow neural network (NN), our multimap estimator allows us to use the same set of QM calculations to both optimize the maps and estimate the free energy, thus removing almost completely the overhead due to training. A multimap extension of the multistate Bennett acceptance ratio estimator is also derived for cases where samples from two or more states are available. Furthermore, we propose a one-epoch learning policy that can be used to efficiently avoid overfitting when computing the loss function is expensive compared to generating data. Finally, we show how our multimap approach can be combined with enhanced sampling strategies to overcome the pervasive problem of poor convergence due to slow degrees of freedom. We test our method on the HiPen dataset of drug-like molecules and fragments, and we show that it can accelerate the calculation of the free energy difference of switching from a force field to a DFTB3 potential by about 3 orders of magnitude compared to standard FEP and by a factor of about 8 compared to previously published nonequilibrium calculations.Comment: Added Algorithm 1, wall-clock timings, additional uncertainty estimates, and other minor edits. Main Text: 12 pages, 5 figures, 7 equations. Supplemental Material: 17 pages, 5 figures, 22 equation

Enabling Information Gathering Patterns for Emergency Response with the OpenKnowledge System

Today's information systems must operate effectively within open and dynamic environments. This challenge becomes a necessity for crisis management systems. In emergency contexts, in fact, a large number of actors need to collaborate and coordinate in the disaster scenes by exchanging and reporting information with each other and with the people in the control room. In such open settings, coordination technologies play a crucial role in supporting mobile agents located in areas prone to sudden changes with adaptive and flexible interaction patterns. Research efforts in different areas are converging to devise suitable mechanisms for process coordination: specifically, current results on service-oriented computing and multi-agent systems are being integrated to enable dynamic interaction among autonomous components in large, open systems. This work focuses on the exploitation and evaluation of the OpenKnowledge framework to support different information-gathering patterns in emergency contexts. The OpenKnowledge (OK) system has been adopted to model and simulate possible emergency plans. The Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) is used to specify interaction models, which are published, discovered and executed by the OK distributed infrastructure in order to simulate peer interactions. A simulation environment fully integrated with the OK system has been developed to: (1) evaluate whether such infrastructure is able to support different models of information-sharing, e.g., centralized and decentralized patterns of interaction; (2) investigate under which conditions the OK paradigm, exploited in its decentralized nature, can improve the performance of more conventional centralized approaches. Preliminary results show the capability of the OK system in supporting the two afore-mentioned patterns and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases