What are the likely interactions among innovation,government debt,and employment?

The study here analyzes the interactions among labor, R&D intensity, and public expenditure on education (indicators of innovation), considering public debt of countries. The study is based on 27 European countries over the 1995–2009 and applies multiple regression analysis. Main findings seem to be: a significant interaction of public expenditure on education and R&D intensity with employment rate, whereas an increase of general government consolidated gross debt has a negative interaction for employment rate as well as for technology indicators. The theoretical framework and empirical evidence suggest vital political economy implications to support employment rate during contractions of the business cycle. In particular, considering the specificity of the economic structure of countries, a fruitful lung-run political economy of growth should slowly dry out public debt by supporting GDP growth, rather than reducing government debt with high taxation and balanced-budget rules, in order to decrease frictional effects for patterns of economic, technological, and employment growth.     

Effects of air pollution and weather on the initial COVID-19 outbreaks in United States,Italy, Spain,and China: A comparative study

Contrasting effects have been identified in association of weather (temperature and humidity) and pollutant gases with COVID-19 infection, which could be derived from the influence of lockdowns and season change. The influence of pollutant gases and climate during the initial phases of the pandemic, before the closures and the change of season in the northern hemisphere, is unknown. Here, we used a spatial-temporal Bayesian zero-inflated-Poisson model to test for short-term associations of weather and pollutant gases with the relative risk of COVID-19 disease in China (first outbreak) and the countries with more cases during the initial pandemic (the United States, Spain and Italy), considering also the effects of season and lockdown. We found contrasting association between pollutant gases and COVID-19 risk in the United States, Italy, and Spain, while in China it was negatively associated (except for SO₂). COVID-19 risk was positively associated with specific humidity in all countries, while temperature presented a negative effect. Our findings showed that short-term associations of air pollutants with COVID-19 infection vary strongly between countries, while generalized effects of temperature (negative) and humidity (positive) with COVID-19 was found. Our results show novel information about the influence of pollution and weather on the initial outbreaks, which contribute to unravel the mechanisms during the beginning of the pandemic.     

Measuring residential segregation in multi-ethnic and unequal European cities

Immigration flows and social inequalities reflect increased social and multi-ethnic segregation in contemporary urban Europe. For a better understanding of these processes, the present study investigates the main strengths of the multi-group residential indices, testing sensitivity and reliability under different metropolitan contexts in five European countries. These indices focus on different research dimensions and approach multi-group residential segregation conceptually and mathematically in a different way. A multivariate exploratory data analysis was adopted to classify the observed segregation patterns into a few homogeneous types and to delineate the multivariate relationship between the indices. The results of principal component analysis demonstrate that the indices assessing uniformity and disproportionality of the social groups analysed (H and D) contribute largely to the diversification in today's multi-ethnic communities, clarifying the importance of the dimension of evenness. Our results highlight how segregation is more evident in economically disadvantaged metropolitan regions with high levels of social vulnerability.     

Italian Social Enterprises at the Crossroads: Their Role in the Evolution of the Welfare State

This paper investigates the relationship between the emergence of social enterprises (SEs) and the historical development of the Italian welfare state. Our research offers a comprehensive overview of the internal and external influences that shaped the constitutive relations between the welfare state and SEs. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups has been adopted. This study suggests that two interconnected dynamics—the emergence of new social needs being answered by private organisations and the increased prominence of third sector actors during the privatisation of the welfare state—shaped the co-evolution of the welfare state and SEs in Italy. The study also suggests that the emergence and evolution of Social Enterprises in the years leading up to 2001 was mainly a bottom-up phenomena stemming from the actions of citizens setting up private organisations (often cooperatives) to answer to social problems created by new social needs and the structural reform of the welfare state. After 2001 especially with the new law on SEs in 2016, the evolution of SEs seems to have been increasingly influenced by the surrounding ecosystem of actors and supranational policy discourses rather than SEs themselves.     

Income tax schedule and redistribution in direct democracies – the Swiss case

This study examines redistribution policy through personal income taxes in Swiss cantons over the period 1995–2011. In a first step, redistribution measures are estimated with the help of exhaustive administrative data. Redistribution is decomposed into average tax rate and tax progression. In a second step, we investigate the impact of direct democratic institutions and their usage on tax policy and redistribution. The results suggest that the effect of direct democracy on income tax redistribution is a multilayered process. First, the theoretical availability of direct democracy tools does not seem to have the same impact as the effective use of them. Second, fiscal referendums may – in the short term –reduce redistribution through lower tax rates and lead to less tax progression. Third, an increasing number of ballots on initiatives leads to more tax progression and more redistribution in the long run. It seems that the short-term dampening effects of fiscal referendums on redistribution may be overridden in the long run by the expansive effect of popular initiatives.     

An evaluation of change-point estimators for a sequence of normal observations with unknown parameters

Performance of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of the change-point in normal series is evaluated considering three scenarios where process parameters are assumed to be unknown. Different shifts, sample sizes, and locations of a change-point were tested. A comparison is made with estimators based on cumulative sums and Bartlett's test. Performance analysis done with extensive simulations for normally distributed series showed that the MLEs perform better (or equal) in almost every scenario, with smaller bias and standard error. In addition, robustness of MLE to non-normality is also studied.     

An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems

The efficient and effective management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital's environment comprising a vast share of the operational costs. The adopted nurse workforce practices and policies highly affect the nurses' working conditions and the provided quality of care. Policy decisions on the staffing level have an impact on the outcome of the scheduling level and vice versa. Isolated reasoning typically leads to suboptimal decisions often resulting in ineffective outcomes of care. In order to overcome these inefficiencies, we propose in this paper a new integrative nurse staffing and shift scheduling approach. We test and assess the benefits of our approach in a reallife environment. Moreover, we examine the impact of several personnel policies on the staffing decision.     

Technological innovation and operational effectiveness: their role in achieving performance improvements

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the alignment between technological innovation effectiveness and operational effectiveness after the implementation of enterprise information systems, and the impact of this alignment on the improvement in operational performance. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine structural relationships between the set of observed variables and the set of continuous latent variables. The findings from this research suggest that the dimensions stemming from technological innovation effectiveness such as system quality, information quality, service quality, user satisfaction and the performance objectives stemming from operational effectiveness such as cost, quality, reliability, flexibility and speed are important and significantly well-correlated factors. These factors promote the alignment between technological innovation effectiveness and operational effectiveness and should be the focus for managers in achieving effective implementation of technological innovations. In addition, there is a significant and direct influence of this alignment on the improvement of operational performance. The principal limitation of this study is that the findings are based on investigation of small sample size.