Naturoids: From a dream to a paradox

The human ambition to reproduce natural objects and processes has a long history, and ranges from pure dreams to actual design: from Icarus's wings to modern-day robotics and bioengineering. The concept of naturoid has been introduced in the last decade or so, for referring to man's attempts to reproduce natural phenomena. The development of naturoids may be viewed as a special class of technological activity, distinct from the general class of technology. The concept of naturoid should be useful for methodological research aimed at finding possible common rules, potentialities and constraints characterizing the human effort to reproduce natural objects.Tacitly, many designers think that the continuing improvement of a naturoid consists in its ever-growing overlap with the natural instance, and that the holy grail, as it were, is the complete reconstruction of a natural object of process, from its external appearance to its inner workings. This paper tries to show that a naturoid is always the result of a reduction of the complexity of natural objects, due to an unavoidable multiple selection strategy. Nevertheless, the reproduction process implies that naturoids take on their own new complexity, resulting in a transfiguration of the natural exemplars and their performances, leading to a true innovation explosion. As a matter of fact, the core performances of contemporary naturoids improve, but, paradoxically, the more a naturoid develops, the further away it moves from its natural counterpart. Therefore, naturoids will more and more affect our relationships with advanced technologies and with nature, but in ways quite beyond our predictive capabilities.     

What Determines Export Diversification in the Development Process? Empirical Assessment

This paper assesses the role played by country‐specific factors as determinants of relative export diversification. Using a panel data set for 60 countries and 20 years (1985–2004), we confirm that even after clearing out differences in income per capita, cross‐country variability in the degree of export diversification is significant. In general, apart from per capita income, features influencing the size of accessible markets (domestic and foreign) are the most relevant and robust determinants of the export diversification process. Diversification opportunities grow if countries are large and not located far from economic core areas and when barriers to trade are restricted.     

Optimal Size in the Waste Collection Sector

The purpose of this study is to analyze the cost structure of a sample of Italian wastecollection firms in order to assess economies of scale and density and, therefore, definethe optimal size of the firms. A total and a variable translog cost function were estimated using panel data for a sample of 30 firms operating at the provincial level over the period 1991–1995.The empirical evidence suggests that franchised monopoly, rather than side-by-sidecompetition, is the most efficient form of production organization in the waste collection industry. Further, the majority of firms are not operating at optimal scale.     

Nominal shocks and the current account: A structural VAR analysis of 14 OECD countries

This paper provides some empirical evidence on one of the most controversial theoretical implications of the new open economy literature, which refers to the role of the current account in the international monetary transmission mechanism. In order to throw some light on this issue, two structural VAR models are estimated separately for 14 industrialized countries. The main empirical results highlight the importance of the role of nominal disturbances for current account fluctuations. Additionally, it is found that expansionary nominal shocks generate temporary current account surpluses, whose size is positively correlated with the openness of the individual countries. JEL no. C32, E40, F41, F42     

Mimicking repurchases

We study the tendency of firms to mimic the repurchase announcements of their industry counterparts. We argue that a firm, by repurchasing its shares, sends a positive signal about itself and a negative one about its competitors. This induces the competing firms to mimic the behavior of the repurchasing firm by repurchasing themselves. Using a broad sample of US firms from the period 1984–2002, we show that, in concentrated industries, a repurchase announcement lowers the stock price of the other firms in the same industry. The other firms react by repurchasing themselves to undo these negative effects. Repurchases are chosen as a strategic reaction to other firms’ repurchase decisions and are not motivated by the desire to time the market, i.e., to take advantage of a significantly undervalued stock price. Therefore, repurchasing firms in more concentrated industries experience a lower increase in value in comparison with their counterparts in less concentrated industries in the post-announcement era. Alternative methodologies used to estimate long-term performance confirm that it is only the repurchasing firms in low concentration industries that outperform the market, their non-repurchasing peers, and their counterparts in more concentrated industries by amounts that are economically and statistically significant.     

Social Position and Behaviour: A Formalization

Modern society has witnessed anever-increasing development in the social sciences;partly due to changes in mentality, and partly due tothe growing requirements of the economic and political world – requirements which frequently takeon the guise of necessity, as for instance in thecases of market research and electoral opinion polls.Such development has produced an increasing paralleldemand for mathematical accuracy and exactitude inthese fields.The intention here is to rationalize the basic logicand methodology of the sociological procedure; anintention, it is hoped, which could be influential inimproving practical sociological work by rendering itmore comprehensible. This requires the employment offairly sophisticated mathematical and statisticalnotions.Section 1 outlines the definitions considered essential for the rationalization of the basiclogic framework previously described.Section 2 discusses the general concept of statisticalvariance. Section 3 introduces the notion of ``heterogeneity'and offers several propositions linked to this concept.Section 5 revolves around the notion of ``inaccuracy'.Section 6 presents a theorem relating to theimmersion of metric spaces in Banach spaces, andshows how the theorem can be used to constructtheoretically satisfactory immersion algorithms.Section 7 together with the material, which ispreviously introduced in Section 4, outlines thecluster analysis and the principal components methodologies.     

Ambiguous Games

This paper introduces ambiguous games, a modification of the normal form that allows the presence of vagueness in players' beliefs over the opponents' choice of strategies. An appropriate notion of equilibrium is presented, and a general existence result is proved. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D81.     

Perceived quality of public services, liquidity constraints, and the demand of private specialist care

In this article we offer direct evidence on the role of perceived quality differences in publicly provided health care services, in determining the incentive to opt out for private services and, for poor individuals, short-run credit constraints in the access to these services. We concentrate on private specialist care, a category of services for which disparities in the access are highest. We use Bank of Italy—SHIW data to first study the determinants of demand for private and public specialist care, estimating probit and bivariate probit models, and ZIP models. We then apply the Carneiro–Heckman procedure to identify the share of people constrained and study how perceived quality of public services affects the percentage of people short run constrained. Our estimates suggest the presence of large territorial differences, as for the role of income and the quality of public services.     

The impact of local and external university knowledge on the creation of knowledge-intensive firms: evidence from the Italian case

This paper investigates how far in space university knowledge goes to breed the creation of knowledge-intensive firms (KIFs), depending on the nature (either codified or tacit) and quality of this knowledge. We consider the impact of knowledge codified in academic patents and scientific publications and tacit knowledge embodied in university graduates on KIF creation in Italian provinces in 2010, while distinguishing between local university knowledge created by universities located in the same province and external university knowledge created by universities located outside the province. Our econometric estimates indicate that the positive effects of scientific publications and university graduates are confined within the boundaries of the province in which universities are located. Conversely, the creation of new KIFs in a focal province is positively affected by both local and external university knowledge codified in academic patents, even though the positive effect of this external knowledge rapidly diminishes with geographic distance. Furthermore, the above effects are confined to high-quality universities; low-quality universities have little effect on KIF creation.