Disentangling the Housing Satisfaction Puzzle: Does Homeownership Really Matter?

There is a general consensus that homeownership has beneficial effects for both individuals and society in many outcomes. However, research regarding the effect of homeownership on individuals' subjective well-being remains inconclusive. In this paper, for the first time, we provide empirical evidence for the link between homeownership and housing satisfaction using panel data. We use the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) covering the period 1994-2001. We observe that renters who become homeowners not only experience a significant increase in housing satisfaction, but also after changing their tenure status, they obtain a different utility from the same housing context. This evidence might provide support to the hypothesis that a share of the differences in the perceived utility derived from housing can be attributed to (un)fulfilled expectations or aspirations regarding homeownership. Keywords: Housing satisfaction, subjective well-being, homeownership, fixed-effects, housing aspirations JEL classification: D1, R2.

Narrating urban entrepreneurship: a matter of imagineering?

The battle between cities with regard to their creative possibilities has evolved into a process of multiplying ever-new images and variegated stories of urban attractiveness and success. Engineering “cool” images and “hot” stories about one’s city is now a central endeavor in the narratives of urban policy-making that center more and more on the idea of the entrepreneurial city. The making of an entrepreneurial image is enacted through various narrative genres that lie somewhere between place making and place marketing, between branding and boosting, between restoration and revanchism, between iconic architecture and mega-spectacle. This “imagineering” is not only part of the way cities try to (re)present themselves as entrepreneurial to various audiences through a real “image inflation” (Zukin, 2008, p. xii) but is 1 Forthcoming in: B. Lange,.A. Kalandides, B. Stoeber, I. Wellmann (Hrsg.) (2009): Governance der Kreativwirtschaft. Diagnosen und Handlungsoptionen. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld. 2 also inscribed in the various ways urban creativity and entrepreneurship can be studied, researched and imagined. In this chapter we aim to differentiate the political narratives of the entrepreneurial city as we emphasize the need to understand the politics of narration and make a plea for critical reflexivity in our forms of researching and theorizing. We will thus try to investigate how the politics of narration is intertwined with the narration of political concepts and will argue that the narrating of urban entrepreneurship can raise very different images and discourses of city life beyond those that are currently engineered. We will distinguish between a grand narrative, a counter-narrative, and an assemblage of more ambivalent little narratives, which we call prosaic narration. While the distinction between these three types might be seen as a bit too simple and “straight”, we believe that by juxtaposing these different forms of narration and alternating between them, we can help problematize the engineering of the city as entrepreneurial and imagine alternative views both of city life and of what is understood as its creativity.

Why do educated mothers matter? A model of parental help

The paper investigates the role of mothers in affecting childrens' performance at school. It develops a theoretical model in which household is treated as an individual, whose utility depends on the performance at school of the student and on consumption. The model focuses on the possibilities through which mother’s help may affect pupil's performance in terms of time devoted to supervision and spillover effects. Empirical evidence, using Italian PISA 2006, shows that highly educated mothers have a positive impact on students' score only when they are highly qualified in the job market.

Monetary policy rules and financial stress: does financial instability matter for monetary

We examine whether and how main central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. We employ a new methodology for monetary policy rules estimation, which allows for time-varying response coefficients as well as corrects for endogeneity. This flexible framework applied to the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and Sweden together with a new financial stress dataset developed by the International Monetary Fund allows not only testing whether the central banks responded to financial stress but also detects the periods and type of stress that were the most worrying for monetary authorities and to quantify the intensity of policy response. Our findings suggest that central banks often change policy

Location Determinants of New Firms: Does Skill Level of Human Capital Really Matter?

This paper is about the role played by stock of human capital on location decisions of new manufacturing plants. We analyse the effect of several skill levels (from basic school to PhD) on decisions about the location of plants in various industries and, therefore, of different technological levels. We also test whether spatial aggregation level biases the results and determine the most appropriate areas to be considered in analyses of these phenomena. Our main statistical source is the Register of Manufacturing Establishments of Catalonia (REIC), which has plant-level microdata on the locations of new manufacturing plants. Keywords: agglomeration economies, industrial location, human capital, count-data models, spatial econometrics.

The Innovation and Imitation Dichotomy in Spanish firms: do absorptive capacity and the technological frontier matter?

This paper analyses whether a firm’s absorptive capacity and its distance from the technological frontier affect the choice between innovation and imitation in innovative Spanish firms. From an extensive survey of 5,575 firms during the 2004-2009 period, we found two significant results. With regard to the role of absorptive capacity, the empirical evidence shows that when innovative firms have difficulties in accessing external information and hire skilled workers, their innovative capacity is reduced. Meanwhile, with regard to distance from the technological frontier, the firms that reduce this gap manage to increase their innovative capacity at the expense of imitation. To summarise, when we studied firms’ absorptive capacity and their relative position to the technological frontier in tandem, we found that the two factors directly affected firms' ability to innovate or imitate.

The Innovation and Imitation Dichotomy in Spanish firms: do absorptive capacity and the technological frontier matter?

This paper analyses whether a firm’s absorptive capacity and its distance from the technological frontier affect the choice between innovation and imitation in innovative Spanish firms. From an extensive survey of 5,575 firms during the 2004-2009 period, we found two significant results. With regard to the role of absorptive capacity, the empirical evidence shows that when innovative firms have difficulties in accessing external information and hire skilled workers, their innovative capacity is reduced. Meanwhile, with regard to distance from the technological frontier, the firms that reduce this gap manage to increase their innovative capacity at the expense of imitation. To summarise, when we studied firms’ absorptive capacity and their relative position to the technological frontier in tandem, we found that the two factors directly affected firms' ability to innovate or imitate. Key words: R&D sources, innovation and imitation strategies, absorptive capacity, technological frontier, ordered probit.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Importa si una guerra civil es combat com un conflicte irregular, convencional o simètric no convencional? En altres paraules, tenen les “tecnologies de la rebel·lió” un impacte sobre la gravetat d’una guerra, la seva durada o el seu resultat? Aquest treball mostra que els conflictes irregulars duren més que els altres tipus de conflicte, mentre els convencionals tendeixen a ser més greus en termes de letalitat al camp de batalla. D’altra banda, els conflictes irregulars tendeixen a ser guanyats pels governs, mentre els altres són més propensos a acabar en empat. Substancialment, aquests resultats ens ajuden a donar sentit a l’evolució de les guerres civils, les quals tendeixen a ser més curtes, més intenses i més difícils per als governs. Teòricament, aquests resultats donen suport a la importància de la tecnologia de rebel·lió a l’estudiar la gravetat, la durada i els resultats de les guerres civils; a més, contribueixen a una millor comprensió de la contribució històrica de la guerra irregular a la construcció de l’Estat i al canvi social.

Analysis and Monte Carlo simulations of a model for the spread of infectious diseases in heterogeneous metapopulations

We present a study of the continuous-time equations governing the dynamics of a susceptible infected-susceptible model on heterogeneous metapopulations. These equations have been recently proposed as an alternative formulation for the spread of infectious diseases in metapopulations in a continuous-time framework. Individual-based Monte Carlo simulations of epidemic spread in uncorrelated networks are also performed revealing a good agreement with analytical predictions under the assumption of simultaneous transmission or recovery and migration processes

Exploring unfrequent events with accelerated molecular dynamics simulations: from photochemistry to drug design

La meva incorporació al grup de recerca del Prof. McCammon (University of California San Diego) en qualitat d’investigador post doctoral amb una beca Beatriu de Pinós, va tenir lloc el passat 1 de desembre de 2010; on vaig dur a terme les meves tasques de recerca fins al darrer 1 d’abril de 2012. El Prof. McCammon és un referent mundial en l’aplicació de simulacions de dinàmica molecular (MD) en sistemes biològics d’interès humà. La contribució més important del Prof. McCammon en la simulació de sistemes biològics és el desenvolupament del mètode de dinàmiques moleculars accelerades (AMD). Les simulacions MD convencionals, les quals estan limitades a l’escala de temps del nanosegon (~10-9s), no son adients per l’estudi de sistemes biològics rellevants a escales de temps mes llargues (μs, ms...). AMD permet explorar fenòmens moleculars poc freqüents però que son clau per l’enteniment de molts sistemes biològics; fenòmens que no podrien ser observats d’un altre manera. Durant la meva estada a la “University of California San Diego”, vaig treballar en diferent aplicacions de les simulacions AMD, incloent fotoquímica i disseny de fàrmacs per ordinador. Concretament, primer vaig desenvolupar amb èxit una combinació dels mètodes AMD i simulacions Car-Parrinello per millorar l’exploració de camins de desactivació (interseccions còniques) en reaccions químiques fotoactivades. En segon lloc, vaig aplicar tècniques estadístiques (Replica Exchange) amb AMD en la descripció d’interaccions proteïna-lligand. Finalment, vaig dur a terme un estudi de disseny de fàrmacs per ordinador en la proteïna-G Rho (involucrada en el desenvolupament de càncer humà) combinant anàlisis estructurals i simulacions AMD. Els projectes en els quals he participat han estat publicats (o estan encara en procés de revisió) en diferents revistes científiques, i han estat presentats en diferents congressos internacionals. La memòria inclosa a continuació conté més detalls de cada projecte esmentat.

Distributed all-atom simulations of intrinsically unstructured proteins

The Computational Biophysics Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (GRIB-UPF) hosts two unique computational resources dedicated to the execution of large scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations: (a) the ACMD molecular-dynamics software, used on standard personal computers with graphical processing units (GPUs); and (b) the GPUGRID. net computing network, supported by users distributed worldwide that volunteer GPUs for biomedical research. We leveraged these resources and developed studies, protocols and open-source software to elucidate energetics and pathways of a number of biomolecular systems, with a special focus on flexible proteins with many degrees of freedom. First, we characterized ion permeation through the bactericidal model protein Gramicidin A conducting one of the largest studies to date with the steered MD biasing methodology. Next, we addressed an open problem in structural biology, the determination of drug-protein association kinetics; we reconstructed the binding free energy, association, and dissaciociation rates of a drug like model system through a spatial decomposition and a Makov-chain analysis. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and become one of the few landmark papers elucidating a ligand-binding pathway. Furthermore, we investigated the unstructured Kinase Inducible Domain (KID), a 28-peptide central to signalling and transcriptional response; the kinetics of this challenging system was modelled with a Markovian approach in collaboration with Frank Noe’s group at the Freie University of Berlin. The impact of the funding includes three peer-reviewed publication on high-impact journals; three more papers under review; four MD analysis components, released as open-source software; MD protocols; didactic material, and code for the hosting group.

Market rewards to patterns on increasing earnings: do cash flow patterns, accruals manipulation and real activities manipulation matter?

This study explores whether firms have differential price-earnings multiples associated with their means of achieving a sequential pattern of increasing positive earnings. Our main findings show that market participants assign higher price-earnings multiples to firms when their pattern of increasing earnings is supported by the same pattern of increasing cash flows. Market participants assign lower price-earnings multiples to firms suspect of having engaged in accrual-based earnings management, sales manipulation, and overproduction to achieve the earnings pattern. We find, however, that market participants do not penalize firms suspect of having achieved the earnings pattern through the opportunistic reduction of discretionary expenses.