Suchergebnisse

The aim of this work is to present and investigate a model that departs from three considerations. First, fiscal policy and debt sustainability are two sides of the same coin: the former is the policy instrument that government manages in the present time to achieve its social objectives, whereas, the latter is the repercussion of the former in the long run. Second, fiscal policy has a direct impact on industries capital accumulation because it affects the available income and, therefore, their savings; such an impact can be evaluated through the intertemporal optimization of industries saving decisions. Finally, fiscal policy has to be characterized on both the revenue and the spending side: revenues are determined through a unique tax rate, while spending is represented as an industry-based subsidy with a fixed fraction, Φ, that must be re-invested in capital. The production function in each industry is assumed AK and investment is subjected to quadratic adjustment costs. The consequences of assuming a convex adjustment cost function are twofold: the model does not display growth in the long run and the invested capital due to the public incentivization program hyper-crowds out private saving, consequently the optimal Φ is 0. Another advantage, due to the simplicity of the framework, is that the notion of debt sustainability, contrary to the majority of literature on fiscal policy sustainability, is defined unambiguously therefore it is always possible to determine whether a certain public debt can be sustained. In section 4, the model is solved as a Nash bargaining problem by assuming an explicit welfare function and it is found that the optimal government size results undetermined whenever the optimal Φ is 0. However, in the conclusions, it is proposed a way to modify slightly the model in order to overcome the problem of the hyper-crowding-out and letting the designed public program of capital incentivization work effectively.

Questo saggio mira a presentare un modello in divenire volto ad analizzare gli spazi pubblici urbani (UPS), fondato su quattro dimensioni localmente situate –socioeconomica, socioculturale, socio-ambientale e politico-amministrativa – e una dimensione esterna, strutturale. In quanto modello relazionale, si concentra sul modo in cui le istituzioni capitaliste/statali e le loro rappresentazioni dello spazio plasmano luoghi e possibilità disuguali e sul modo in cui i cittadini percepiscono, vivono e si appropriano di questi luoghi, conformandosi in misura maggiore o minore allo spazio sociale della città. Un caso studio incentrato sulle persone di Rio de Janeiro che hanno fatto della strada un mezzo di produzione/riproduzione esaminerà il valore euristico del modello, rivelando come gli utenti si sentono nello spazio pubblico urbano, lo pensano e come reagiscono allo spazio "astratto". This essay aims at presenting a model with four non-exhaustive local content dimensions – socioeconomic, sociocultural, socio-environmental, and political-administrative – with an external dimension as a base to analyze urban public spaces (UPS). As a relational model it focus on how capitalist/state institutions and their representations of space conform unequal places and possibilities and how citizens perceive, live and appropriate these places, conforming to greater or lesser degree the city social space. A case study focusing on those who depend on the streets as means of production/reproduction in Rio de Janeiro examines the heuristic value of the model, revealing how users feel and think about UPS and how they react to the abstract space

A reflection on the possibility of drawing up a filing plan model that all Italian public administrations can adopt, with suitable modifications, for managing records of the current archive. The task assigned to the Working Group, by the Agency for Digital Italy - AGID, for developing a model of filing plan scheme has been analysed with the aim to identify both the strong points of a shared project and the related difficulties and problems found.The functional analysis of different types of government has identified a considerable overlap of the generic parts, referring to the general and instrumental functions, assuming a real feasibility of a shared filing plan model in a large scale. It has also highlighted the difficulty in maintaining the same consistency in translating specific and particular functions of other types of public administrations within the same filing plan model. ; Una riflessione sulla possibilità di predisporre un modello di Titolario di classificazione che tutte le pubbliche amministrazioni italiane possano adottare, con gli opportuni adattamenti, per la classificazione dell'archivio corrente. Il lavoro svolto Gruppo di Lavoro, promosso dall'Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale – AGID, incaricato di elaborare lo schema tipo di Titolario è analizzato con l'intento di individuare, da una parte, i punti di forza di un progetto condiviso e dall'altra, le difficoltà e le criticità riscontrate. L'analisi funzionale di diverse tipologie di pubbliche amministrazioni ha individuato una cospicua sovrapponibilità delle parti generiche, relative alle funzioni generali e strumentali, ipotizzando una reale fattibilità di un modello di Titolario condivisibile a larga scala; ha nel contempo, tuttavia, evidenziato la difficoltà di mantenere la medesima coerenza progettuale nel tradurre nello stesso modello di Titolario le funzioni specifiche e peculiari delle diverse tipologie di pubbliche amministrazioni.

This paper outlines the EU regulatory framework and analyses current practice in four European countries in respect of public procurement and tendering of ferry services. Tender management for major ferry services resides with national government agencies, while tenders for smaller volume regional and/or inter-isles services are generally managed by local authorities and/or regional transport authorities. Operator selection criteria increasingly emphasises service quality aspects, and environmental impacts, as well as price (i.e. amount of subsidy required). There is a continued trend towards privately-owned operators providing and investing in essential ferry services, with an increasing role played by larger international integrated transport organisations. For transport authorities, ferry service procurement involves a continuous evolutionary process of specifying, offering, selecting, monitoring and reviewing services supplied. Based on the information collected and analysed, the authors have developed a 'tender route map' which explains the different stages and key issues concerning public procurement of ferry services.

With the proliferation of social media, textual emotion analysis is becoming increasingly important. Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection can be useful to track several applications. They can be used, for instance, in Customer Relationship Management to track sentiments towards companies and their services, or in Government Intelligence, to collect people's emotions and points of views about government decisions. It is clear that tracking reputation and opinions without appropriate text mining tools is simple infeasible. Most of these tools are based on sentiment and emotion lexicons, in which lemmas are associated with the sentiment and/or emotions they evoke. However, almost all languages but English lack high-coverage inventories of this sort. This thesis presents several sentiment analysis tasks to illustrate challenges and opportunities in this research area. We review different state-of-the-art methods for sentiment analysis and emotion detection and describe how we modeled a framework to build emotive resources, that can be effectively exploited for text affective computing. One of the main outcome of the work presented in this thesis is ItEM, which is a high-coverage Italian EMotive lexicon created by exploiting distributional methods.It has been built with a three stage process including the collection of a set of highly emotive words, their distributional expansion and the validation of the system. Since corpus-based methods reflect the type of the corpus from which they are build, in order to create a reliable lexicon we collected a new Italian corpus, namely FB-NEWS15. This collection has been created by crawling the Facebook pages of the most important Italian newspapers, which typically include a small number of posts written by the journalists and a very high number of comments inspired by long discussions among readers about such news. Finally, we describe some experiments on the sentiment polarity classification of tweets. We started from a system based on supervised learning that was originally developed for the Evalita 2014 SENTIment POLarity Classification task (Basile et al., 2014) and subsequently explored the possibility to enrich this system by exploiting lexical emotive features derived from social media texts.

Public good provision has always been a central role of government, but it is also an important element in political competition. The recent financial difficulties of public authorities have undermined their capacity to invest in public goods, requiring politicians to search for new ways to finance those investments. A solution widely adopted is the Public-Private Partnership, an instrument designed to provide more valuable public goods thanks to efficiency gains coming from bundling building and operating phases in a single contract, but that has often resulted in resounding failures. The most common explanation for this lack of results is that PPP are often adopted not for efficiency purposes but to avoid financial constraints. We build a model to analyze the incentives for politicians to use PPP for pork barrel politics in presence of a binding budget constraint, when they have a better ability to look forward than their voters, and are limited in their possibility to stay in charge. We then release the assumption of homogeneous income among voters, and analyze how this modifies politician's incentives to pander.

I provide a full characterization of the quality choice in duopolies with vertical differentiation, without assuming ex-ante if the market is fully covered or not. This will allow to show that covered or uncovered market configurations are endogenous outcomes of firms' strategic interaction. To this purpose, I assume that firms are characterized by quadratic fixed costs of quality improvements and check whether pure-strategy subgame perfect equilibria with a corner solution always exist. Finally, my results are compared to the quality choice that maximizes the total surplus of the economy. I show that the welfare-maximizing choice of qualities does not have to be found in the same market configuration of the corresponding market equilibrium.

Opinion mining is a recent discipline at the crossroads of Information Retrieval and of Computational Linguistics which is concerned not with the topic a document is about, but with the opinion it expresses. It has a rich set of applications, ranging from tracking users' opinions about products or about political candidates as expressed in online forums, to customer relationship management. Functional to the extraction of opinions from text is the determination of the relevant entities of the language that are used to express opinions, and their opinion-related properties. For example, determining that the term beautiful casts a positive connotation to its subject. In this thesis we investigate on the automatic recognition of opinion-related properties of terms. This results into building opinion-related lexical resources, which can be used into opinion mining applications. We start from the (relatively) simple problem of determining the orientation of subjective terms. We propose an original semi-supervised term classification model that is based on the quantitative analysis of the glosses of such terms, i.e. the definitions that these terms are given in on-line dictionaries. This method outperforms all known methods when tested on the recognized standard benchmarks for this task. We show how our method is capable to produce good results on more complex tasks, such as discriminating subjective terms (e.g., good) from objective ones (e.g., green), or classifying terms on a fine-grained attitude taxonomy. We then propose a relevant refinement of the task, i.e., distinguishing the opinion-related properties of distinct term senses. We present SentiWordNet, a novel high-quality, high-coverage lexical resource, where each one of the 115,424 senses contained in WordNet has been automatically evaluated on the three dimensions of positivity, negativity, and objectivity. We propose also an original and effective use of random-walk models to rank term senses by their positivity or negativity. The random-walk algorithms we present have a great application potential also outside the opinion mining area, for example in word sense disambiguation tasks. A result of this experience is the generation of an improved version of SentiWordNet. We finally evaluate and compare the various versions of SentiWordNet we present here with other opinion-related lexical resources well-known in literature, experimenting their use in an Opinion Extraction application. We show that the use of SentiWordNet produces a significant improvement with respect to the baseline system, not using any specialized lexical resource, and also with respect to the use of other opinion-related lexical resources.

In the educational climate of recent decades, recent policy initiatives have been mainly focused on increasing the autonomy of schools. In this scenario, the study of educational leadership has gained interest within the research community because of the widespread belief that the quality of leadership makes an important difference in improving learning and teaching processes. In Italy, the discourse on educational leadership is arguably at an early stage and it has been characterized by different perspectives. Given this premise, by reviewing theoretical and empirical literature on educational leadership, the purpose of this article is to present and discuss the most studied leadership models in educational research in the attempt to make a contribution to the development of this research field in Italy. I recenti orientamenti normativi di Riforma in materia di politica scolastica hanno dato un nuovo impulso all'autonomia delle istituzioni educative. Nel contesto di tali cambiamenti, il tema della leadership educativa ha assunto crescente rilevanza nel dibattito interno alle scienze pedagogiche. La fiorente letteratura internazionale ha dimostrato, peraltro, come la leadership educativa rappresenti una componente chiave per lo sviluppo di ambienti professionali ed organizzativi efficaci per i processi di apprendimento e di insegnamento. In Italia, il recente dibattito e la ricerca sperimentale sulla leadership educativa sono stati attraversati da prospettive e focus interpretativi differenti. Nel tentativo di offrire un contributo atto ad accompagnare lo sviluppo di nuove aree di ricerca all'interno degli attuali scenari educativi e formativi, l'articolo propone una sintetica ricognizione della letteratura internazionale utile a chi voglia esplorare oggi i più attuali, emergenti modelli teorici ed empirici nel campo della ricerca sulla leadership educativa.