Pathways to European identity formation: a tale of two models

This article argues that there are two distinct logics that underlie existing studies on European identification. These are grounded in models of collective identity formation that stress either messages inscribed in discursive processes or practices situated in socio-spatial relations – respectively, the “culturalist” and the “structuralist” models. The first of these models considers identification as a direct outcome of the exposure to content-specific symbols, narratives, and messages; the second, as an emerging property of socio-spatial interactions that are content-free of identity references. The first is logocentric, while the second is democentric and topocentric. This article focuses particularly on the second and less-developed research tradition which explores the effects of cross-national practices. The limits and potential of this model are discussed, setting an agenda for empirical research aiming to better elucidate the causal dynamics of European identity formation and adjudicate between these competing explanations.     

COMPETING MATCHMAKING

We study how matchmakers use prices to sort heterogeneous participants into competing matching markets and how equilibrium outcomes compare with monopoly in terms of prices, matching market structure, and sorting efficiency under the assumption of complementarity in the match value function. The role of prices to facilitate sorting is compromised by the need to survive price competition. We show that price competition leads to a high‐quality market that is insufficiently exclusive. As a result, the duopolistic outcome can be less efficient in sorting than the monopoly outcome in terms of total match value in spite of servicing more participants. (JEL: C7, D4)     

The Citizenship Gap in European Societies: Conceptualizing,Measuring and Comparing ‘Migration Neutrality’ across the EU

Equality in life‐chances of nationals and immigrants is a sensitive issue on which there is more debate than systematic evidence. To evaluate this condition across European societies, the concept of integration as “migration neutrality” is introduced. “Migration neutrality” is defined as the irrelevance of national citizenship as a predictor of key social attainments. Odds ratios are used to measure the relative risk of non‐national as compared with national citizens in the attainment of relevant resources. While this indicator cannot control for compositional differences in the populations at stake, it represents a straightforward benchmark that can be used in different domains to describe and compare foreign citizens’ position relative to nationals. In this article, we calculate it across EU member states through Eurostat data. In particular, the focus is on migration neutrality in the risk of social exclusion. Country variations are found to be hardly amenable to established classifications of integration types. Moreover, the relationship between “migration neutrality” levels and pro‐immigrant policies (as measured by the Mipex index) is found to be weak, suggesting that these policies do not consistently target the reduction of the gap between nationals and non nationals.     

A multi-user tool for enhancing the daily replanning and control of visits in home care services

The uncertainty associated with patients’ demands and operators’ availabilities is the main complexity factor in planning health care activities. Thus, activity replanning is required to react to the variations and to guarantee a good service quality. A particularly complex replanning activity is required in Home Care (HC) services, where any variation to the plans involves several decisions related, e.g. to nurses’ travels. Such complexity makes impossible for planners to integrate and to effectively handle all of the information in real time with the classical HC management tools. In this work, we design, implement and validate a new visualisation tool to support HC planners in handling the data, to better perform their replanning activities. The tool consists of a desk equipped with an interactive map, where up to four planners can manage the information together in a multilayer configuration. This solution allows to manage the high amount of data in a more effective and natural way than the tabular form of the current commercial tools, due to both the horizontal map visualisation and the multilayer information provisioning. The prototype has been tested with real HC planners and expert users; outcomes show the capability to meet the gap between planners and information complexity, and to provide adequate support for replanning HC activities.     

Je suis un Italien de Paris: Italian migrants’ incorporation in a European capital city

ABSTRACT

Italy has experienced a new wave of population outflows, in particular since the end of the 2000s, with France as one of the top destinations. This paper investigates the structural and socio-cultural integration of Italian migrants in Paris. The paper is based on a mixed-methods approach, using in-depth interviews, census data and an online survey. We found that the profile and incorporation patterns of post-crisis migrants reflects a long-term trend of middling migration out of Italy. Similar to other studies, we show that current Italian migrants are prevailingly highly skilled and employed in non-manual jobs. As for socio-cultural integration, the paper highlights the symbolic value of the host city, to which migrants are strongly attached. Moreover, the longer the Italian’s stay in Paris, the higher his/her integration in Italy-oriented activities, both within Paris and in Italy. This indicates a complex incorporation model that is at odds with assimilation but at the same time departs from ethnicised and community-based patterns. Italian migrants combine being both Parisian and Italian in a ‘synergistic balancing act’ (Erdal and Oeppen 2013. ‘Migrant Balancing Acts: Understanding the Interactions between Integration and Transnationalism.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (6):867–884.) of integration and transnationalism.     

A performance counterexample of Billor–Chatterjee–Hadi procedure and an improvement proposal for robust regression

The BCH procedure introduced by Billor, Chatterjee, and Hadi for fitting linear models was found to be inefficient for y-outliers in the presence of a high perturbation level. We propose to modify the first step of the BCH procedure, so that the robust distances are computed on the matrix Z = (y, X) of the basic subset. The performance of the present note procedure (PNP), as compared to the BCH procedure and the ordinary least-square (OLS) method, was studied by processing several datasets used in the literature for robust regression and by performing a Monte Carlo experiment. PNP performs better particularly with datasets having high perturbation.