Search results for " Utility."
showing 10 items of 71 documents
Household debt and labor market fluctuations
2011
Abstract The co-movements of labor productivity with output, total hours, vacancies and unemployment have changed since the mid 1980s. This paper offers an explanation for the sharp break in the fluctuations of labor market variables based on endogenous labor supply decisions following the mortgage market deregulation. We set up a search model with efficient bargaining and financial frictions, in which impatient borrowers can take an amount of credit that cannot exceed a proportion of the expected value of their real estate holdings. When borrowers' equity requirements are low, the impact of a positive technology shock on the marginal utility of consumption is strengthened, which in turn re…
Absorption equipment for energy savings: A case study in Sicily
2013
Abstract This paper considers a feasibility study on the recovery of the reject heat available from an electric utility with two units operating with 120-MW gas turbines; these units have a heat recovery system that feeds the district heating pipeline of an industrial consortium. Thus, feeding the expeller of the absorption equipment installed in a cooling plant for foodstuff stocking represents an opportunity for the feasibility study. This plant operates at both 0 °C and −18 °C. The feasibility study covers two aspects: (1) the technical feasibility of a suitable absorption cooling plant that uses two separate pieces of absorption equipment working with the pair ammonia–water and (2) the …
Hybrid passive and communications-based methods for islanding detection in medium and low voltage smart grids
2013
Islanding condition takes place when a distributed generator (DG) continues to power a part of the grid even if power from electric utility is no longer present. Adverse effects of islanding are power quality deterioration, grid-protection interference, equipment damage, and personnel safety hazards. For these reasons, DG systems must detect an islanding condition and immediately disconnect from the grid (anti-islanding protection). This paper proposes an hybrid solution, for both low voltage (LV) and medium voltage (MV) applications, which makes use of passive and communication-based methods for islanding detection. Among the existing communication technologies, the study is focused on pow…
Green entrepreneurship and SME performance: the moderating effect of firm age
2021
AbstractGreen entrepreneurship has been increasing with growing attention to environment protection by a variety of stakeholders. Green innovation, as the essence of green entrepreneurship, has attracted a broad range of scholarly attention with yet inconclusive findings regarding its effect on firm performance. According to our analyses of 1667 firms listed on SME board and GEM in China during the period from 2010 to 2019, we find interesting results regarding the type of green innovation involved and the moderating effect of firm age on the link between green innovation and SME performance. More precisely, we find green utility-model innovation positively influences firm performance for S…
The atractiveness and competitiveness of tourist destinations: A study on Southern Italian regions
2009
The present paper aims to assess the relative attractiveness of competing tourist destinations on the basis of individual visitors' perceptions regarding a holiday destination. Using the feeling of tourist well-being achieved by individual tourists we evaluate indirectly the competitive ability of the tourist area to offer a compound tourist site attractiveness. The methodology employed here uses individual survey questionnaires on the tourists' evaluation of the quality of tourist facilities and attributes in a given area (the 'regional tourist profile') as the basis for constructing an aggregate expression for the relative attractiveness of that area. Using various multidimensional statis…
Measuring wage discrimination according to an expected utility approach
2012
Following on from the seminal works by Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973), many methods have been proposed to measure wage discrimination against women. Some of these methods focus on the entire distribution of the discrimination experienced by each woman, underlining a common aspect of poverty and discrimination analysis: the latter two are both based on an idea of deprivation which originates from a poverty line (in the case of poverty) and from the expected wage in the absence of discrimination (in the case of wage discrimination) (Jenkins, 1994; Del Río et al., 2011). These approaches hinge on conditional-to-individual-characteristics expected wages, lacking in any focus regarding the ent…
Potencialidades de Google Maps en la investigación social aplicada
2019
In recent years, Google has devoted resources to build a complete map of the world. They constantly scan the territory, collecting a large amount of data that provides updated and complete geographic information. This allows us to have an interoperable map that provides the end user with a search tool, not only of routes but also of shops, equipment and any type of geo-referenced information. In addition, Google Maps provides a series of Application Programming Interface (API), which provides a library of set of subroutines, functions and procedures (in object-oriented programming) that can be used by other software to automate the extraction of information of the Google platform. These fre…
EU income stabilization tool: potential impacts, financial sustainability and farmer’s risk aversion
2021
AbstractThe Income Stabilization Tool, a risk management scheme introduced within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2014–2020, could help European Union farmers manage the income risks they face. This study assesses the potential impact of implementing this tool through the maximum level of contribution to the fund which determines an indifference to participate in the fund and its financial sustainability. The study relies on an expected utility approach and assesses the variability of loss ratios over time using a sample of Italian hazelnut farms as a case study. The participation depends on the level of farmers' contributions and their degree of risk aversion. However, the CAP public …
AN ECONOMIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LAW IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: GAETANO FILANGIERI AND LA SCIENZA DELLA LEGISLAZIONE
2011
This work presents the elements of economic analysis of law that occur in the thought of Gaetano Filangieri. In the pages of La Scienza della Legislazione the Neapolitan writer develops a utilitarian and economic investigation that pays attention to the judgments individuals make over social phenomena at the margin point. A proof of this development can be found in the explanation of the principle of decreasing marginal utility, argued in Head XXXI of Book III, which represents one of the most effective demonstrations that can be found before the end of nineteenth-century literature. The most remarkable fact is that, of all the five parts that compose the Filangierian work, the most rich in…
Gender discrimination and intergenerational transmission of preferences
2004
This paper provides an explanation for the existence of gender discrimination in the labour market focusing on the intergenerational transmission of preferences related to the attitude of women towards jobs and family. Changes in women's preferences over generations depend on the socialization efforts of their parents which in turn are influenced by both the firm's expected recruitment policy and the expected utility from household care. We obtain two types of steady state equilibria: the discriminatory equilibrium, in which women are segregated to low-paid jobs, and the non-discriminatory equilibrium, in which women are hired in highly-paid jobs. The conditions of convergence to each equil…