Modelling Socio-Spatial Change: Istanbul,Kadıköy Case

Social Indicators Research - This study aims to understand the relationship between social structure and morphological character based on a case area...     

Earnings mobility among Italian low-paid workers

This paper uses Italian panel data to analyse low pay transitions since the early 1990s. Results indicate that having more human capital reduces the probability of falling into low pay, but there is little impact on raising exit rates from low pay. Human capital effects are found to be larger for women than for men. There is considerable state dependence: the experience of low pay raises the probability of subsequent low pay episodes. Also, there is substantial unobserved heterogeneity associated with factors such as initial conditions, mobility out of the earnings distribution and educational attainment.

Extending conditional likelihood in models for stratified binary data

The conditional likelihood is widely used in logistic regression models with stratified binary data. In particular, it leads to accurate inference for the parameters of interest, which are common to all strata, eliminating stratum-specific nuisance parameters. The modified profile likelihood is an accurate approximation to the conditional likelihood, but has the advantage of being available for general parametric models. Here, we propose the modified profile likelihood as an ideal extension of the conditional likelihood in generalized linear models for binary data, with generic link function. An important feature is that for the implementation we only need standard outputs of routines for generalized linear models. The accuracy of the method is supported by theoretical properties and is confirmed by simulation results.This research was supported by MIUR COFIN 2001-2003.     

Child-Care Choices by Working Mothers: The Case of Italy

In spite of relatively generous public subsidies and a reputation for high quality, only a very limited proportion of Italian families use public child-care and a large proportion use informal care. In this paper, we attempt to explore the determinants of the use of child-care among dual workers families. Given the limitations of data available we match two different data sets: the Bank of Italy (SHIW) and ISTAT Multiscopo. We find evidence that the availability of public child-care affects in an important way its demand. We also find that increases in costs of public child-care reduce the use of public as well as private indicating a shift to informal child-care. The presence of a grandmother who lives near and is in good health is an important explanation of the choice especially in presence of very small children. An understanding of the importance of these factors is relevant in the evaluation of child-care policies. This is particularly important in Italy, where the majority of families with children have only one child and children would benefit also from the socialization aspects of the child-care system. We would like to thank Christopher Flinn, Massimiliano Bratti, and Maria Concetta Chiuri for helpful comments, Donald Rubin for useful hints on the matching procedure, and participants at the ESPE meeting in New York 2003, the EALE meeting in Lisbon 2004. This research was partially supported by the EC Grant and the Compagnia di San Paolo.     

Innovation and Its Governance Process in Italy

Almost everybody, almost everywhere, speaks and writes about innovation: highly qualified and esteemed people covering key offices. Basically, the matter is debated within the framework of conferences, meetings, symposiums, articles put out in specialized, niche newspapers as well as in mass-circulation ones. Apparently it sounds positive, as innovation seems to have become the main theme, towards which the best efforts are worth being directed. The issue of China and India is now in the limelight. The way out is easy: just more innovation. And what about global competitiveness of Italy, or brain drain? What of GDP increasing less than the average in Europe? Tourism dropping off? Industrial delocalization increasing? What of such an inefficient public administration? The answer is one and only: There is a need for more innovation! That makes a lot of sense somehow; the negative aspect is that, most of the times, the core meaning and the fundamentals of innovation are not really deepened and understood; poor attention is paid to the reasons why the situation of Italy is unsatisfactory as regards innovation or to the main problems to be figured out for such a stalemate to be overcome. This short essay is going to focus on these issues, with a view to foster debate leading to prompt and realistic decisions.     

Russia and the Kyoto Protocol: The Long Road to Ratification

The Russian Federation played a crucial role in the Kyoto Protocol's ratification. Indeed, after the United States withdrawal, its ratification turned out to be indispensable for the Protocol to become legally binding. In early 2002, Russia decided to initiate the ratification process. However, the country long hesitated to fulfil its promises, and for the last two years it sent numerous contradictory signals with respect to its position on climate policy. Consequently, the factors that shape Russia's behaviour in the context of climate negotiations have received increasing attention. The main focus has been on the economic and international aspects motivating the Russian strategy. This paper attempts to complete this analysis by concentrating on a further feature that significantly contributed to Russia's final decision, namely, domestic forces. These factors have often been overlooked in the discussion of the Russian strategy. In order to fill this gap, this paper reconstructs the Russian ratification process, trying to identify the main domestic players and their role.     

Central Bank Autonomy without Monetary Policy

The autonomy of a country’s central bank from political authorities has been advocated both as a remedy against the inflationary bias that would otherwise be present in the conduct of the government’s monetary policy and, more recently, on the basis of empirical evidence. However, both theoretical arguments and empirical findings have associated central bank autonomy with the conduct of monetary policy, while often failing to pay attention to those institutional cases where a central bank is in place but is not responsible for the conduct of monetary policy. These cases are particularly relevant for those countries which do not possess their own currency, or where extreme monetary regimes such as dollarization, currency boards, or monetary unions are present. These institutional settings, where a central bank exists, but there is no monetary policy to be conducted, raise the issue of central bank autonomy in a framework where the inflation bias is no longer pertinent. In other words: Is central bank autonomy still a relevant objective when a country does not run its own monetary policy? The present paper addresses this question, discusses dimensions of autonomy and accountability and maintains that central bank autonomy still does matter, particularly if the central bank is responsible for bank supervision and financial regulation.     

Wages,Skills, and Integration in Poland,Hungary and the Czech Republic: an Industry-level Analysis

This paper analyzes the manufacturing sector of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic between 1993 and 2001 and provides a set of stylized facts regarding the changes occurring in the skill composition of the workforce and in the earning structure by skills, on one hand, and in trade flows and foreign presence through direct investment, on the other hand. All three countries have experienced sharp increases in earning inequality which have concerned almost all manufacturing industries; relative skilled employment has, instead, decreased in almost all Hungarian and Czech industrial branches, while showing the opposite trend in the Polish counterparts. At the same time, the three countries have reoriented and expanded their trade flows and modified the merchandise composition of both exports and imports in favour of high-tech and capital-intensive sectors and against more traditional industries. Foreign direct investment has acquired progressively more importance in the three economies and the high-tech sector – as well as chemicals and machineries – has significantly gained relevance on total stocks. Correlation analysis comes in favour of a prevalently vertical nature of multinational enterprises; moreover, trade flows are in general negatively correlated with relative wages and employment, whereas the sign of the relation between foreign direct investments and earning inequality is clearly positive in Poland only.     

Nonlinear models for ground-level ozone forecasting

One of the main concerns in air pollution is excessive tropospheric ozone concentration. The aim of this work is to develop statistical models giving shortterm forecasts of future ground-level ozone concentrations. Since there are few physical insights about the dynamic relationship between ozone, precursor emissions and/or meteorological factors, a nonparametric and nonlinear approach seems promising in order to specify the forecast models. First, we apply four nonparametric procedures to forecast daily maximum 1-hour and maximum 8-hour averages of ozone concentrations in an urban area. Then, in order to improve the forecast performances, we combine the time series of the forecasts. This idea seems to give encouraging results. This work was supported by a MURST grant. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.     

Challenges in Development and Implementation of Health‐Risk‐Based Soil Quality Guidelines: Turkey's Experience

Management of contaminated sites is a critical environmental issue around the world due to the human health risk involved for many sites and scarcity of funding. Moreover, clean‐up costs of all contaminated sites to their background levels with existing engineering technologies may be financially infeasible and demand extended periods of operation time. Given these constraints, to achieve optimal utilization of available funds and prioritization of contaminated sites that need immediate attention, health‐risk‐based soil quality guidelines should be preferred over the traditional soil quality standards. For these reasons, traditional soil quality standards are being replaced by health‐risk‐based ones in many countries and in Turkey as well. The need for health‐risk‐based guidelines is clear, but developing these guidelines and implementation of them in contaminated site management is not a straightforward process. The goal of this study is to highlight the problems that are encountered at various stages of the development process of risk‐based soil quality guidelines for Turkey and how they are dealt with. Utilization of different definitions and methodologies at different countries, existence of inconsistent risk assessment tools, difficulties in accessing relevant documents and reports, and lack of specific data required for Turkey are among these problems. We believe that Turkey's experience may help other countries that are planning to develop health‐risk‐based guidelines achieve their goals in a more efficient manner.