The Impact of Temporary Migration on Source Countries

We quantify the home country effects of different types of temporary and permanent migration patterns using a global integrated model for three developing countries. Our results suggest that migration (whether permanent or temporary) is beneficial for income as well as for poverty reduction in the home countries as it raises remittances, labor productivity, trade, and foreign direct investment and it provides incentives for human capital accumulation. These channels offset the negative impact of “brain drain.” In the simulations, temporary migration programs yield better outcomes than permanent migration due to the productivity gains induced in the home countries by returning migrants.     

Common Drifting Volatility in Large Bayesian VARs

The general pattern of estimated volatilities of macroeconomic and financial variables is often broadly similar. We propose two models in which conditional volatilities feature comovement and study them using U.S. macroeconomic data. The first model specifies the conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor, plus an idiosyncratic component. We label this model BVAR with general factor stochastic volatility (BVAR-GFSV) and we show that the loss in terms of marginal likelihood from assuming a common factor for volatility is moderate. The second model, which we label BVAR with common stochastic volatility (BVAR-CSV), is a special case of the BVAR-GFSV in which the idiosyncratic component is eliminated and the loadings to the factor are set to 1 for all the conditional volatilities. Such restrictions permit a convenient Kronecker structure for the posterior variance of the VAR coefficients, which in turn permits estimating the model even with large datasets. While perhaps misspecified, the BVAR-CSV model is strongly supported by the data when compared against standard homoscedastic BVARs, and it can produce relatively good point and density forecasts by taking advantage of the information contained in large datasets.     

Network,exposure and rhetoric: Italian occupational fields and heterogeneity in constructing the globalized self

Drawing on the findings of a broad inter‐university research programme conducted in Italy, in this article we explore how individuals' transnational networks combine with other dimensions of their social experience in the production of a self‐perception of their own ‘global identity’. In particular, attention is focused on the structures and social spaces of everyday life in five crucial occupations (corporate managers, financial services workers, artists, media professionals and schoolteachers) where people's professional action is performed simultaneously along local and global axes. Within these groups the globalized self does not merely reflect individuals' engagement in transnational networks, but is also the outcome of a complex process including two added dimensions of social life in the job setting: (1) the degree and type of non‐filtered exposure to pressures stemming from the global environment, which both constrain and enable subjective practices of coping with change and ambiguity; and (2) the degree and type of competence in the rhetorics of globalization, namely the level of access to well‐known repertoires of interpretive resources for making sense of global trends. This analysis is consistent with social science conceptualizations arguing for a more nuanced understanding of globalization. In this light, not only is globalization a multidimensional process but it also produces a variety of responses and meanings by differently positioned actors.     

Well-Being in Italian Regions. Measures,Civil Society Consultation and Evidence

Efforts recently attempted to integrate various aspects of economic progress, environmental sustainability and social welfare into an aggregate measure of well-being share one major weakness concerning the identification of key aspects of well-being and of weights to aggregate these dimensions, they all suffer from lack of legitimacy. In this paper we present an innovative and well tested approach that attempts to overcome such limitation granting legitimacy through a broad consultation of civil society organisations. After a brief review of the state of the art, we present the methodology followed to build the QUARS (Index of Regional Quality of Development) and we point out strengths and weaknesses of our approach. We summarize the results according to the selected variables for Italian regions, we present the outcomes of our dissemination work and assess the robustness of the composite indicator.     

Short-Term Skilled Labour Movements and Economic Growth

Economic models typically study the long-term effects of migration, and hence emphasise their impact on a country's endowment of skills using net migration rates. This approach however does not take into account the contribution of short-term movements of skilled labour on a country's stock of knowledge and ability to innovate. This paper develops a theoretical approach to extend the analysis to gross migration flows, which captures the volume of interactions and the potential for knowledge exchanges between a country's skilled labour and workers living elsewhere. One implication of the approach developed is that higher growth can be achieved through higher international labour mobility, even if there is no net migration. Countries that find it difficult or impossible to attract skilled labour on a permanent basis may therefore enjoy the growth effect brought by skilled temporary migrants.     

Clinical sociology between social disease and sociological disease

This essay's aim is to explore the potential for relieving suffering with which clinical sociology can provide social actors. The author carries out a theoretical reflection of culture's function in human societies. Culture is an instrument for social actors, to give a meaning to what is happening at each moment. If culture does not grant an effective interpretation of reality, phenomena of disease can arise. This can happen for many different reasons, such as incoherent cultural representations or conflicts between different cultural issues. The paper outlines the kinds of cultural disease that can occur, as well as the possible causes of each. It also sets a link between cultural disease and the contemporary, general lack of cognitive references, due to historical changes – such as globalization – that have been happening too fast to be fully accepted by all.     

The project of a new of neural networks products line: An application

The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to the issue ofpositioning and pricing a firm's new products line; it is shown here how to conceive an artificial neural system able to find the optimal solution. The formulation of the problem follows the model proposed by Dobson and Kalish, while the implementation is based on the Hopfield Neural Network, thus used here for a new class of problems. The model shows a capacity to converge to the optimal solution; besides its effectiveness, this technique appears to also be efficient if applied to such a production problem.     

A semi-analytical solution to the maximum-likelihood fit of Poisson data to a linear model using the Cash statistic

The Cash statistic, also known as the C statistic, is commonly used for the analysis of low-count Poisson data, including data with null counts for certain values of the independent variable. The use of this statistic is especially attractive for low-count data that cannot be combined, or re-binned, without loss of resolution. This paper presents a new maximum-likelihood solution for the best-fit parameters of a linear model using the Poisson-based Cash statistic. The solution presented in this paper provides a new and simple method to measure the best-fit parameters of a linear model for any Poisson-based data, including data with null counts. In particular, the method enforces the requirement that the best-fit linear model be non-negative throughout the support of the independent variable. The method is summarized in a simple algorithm to fit Poisson counting data of any size and counting rate with a linear model, by-passing entirely the use of the traditional χ2 statistic.