Surveillance is a process that observes behaviour, recognises properties and identifies individuals. It has become a commonplace phenomenon in our everyday life. Many surveillance practices depend on the use of advanced technologies to collect, store and process data. We propose (i) an abstract definition of surveillance; and (ii) an abstract definition of identity, designed to capture the comm...

Why are Italian grown-up children so reluctant to leave the parental home? In this paper we present a theoretical model predicting that this behavior can be induced by high job insecurity of children and low job insecurity of their parents. Both aggregate data for EU countries and microeconometric results, using data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the 1990s, are broa...

In many decision making problems evaluations of possible alternatives of choice, with respect to several points of view (criteria) are expressed by means of h−interval (or fuzzy numbers). For example a pessimistic and an optimistic evaluation generate an interval containing the exact evaluation. These situations reflect lack of information or uncertainty on the same evaluations. In this paper w...

This paper provides new evidence that estimates obtained from aggregated data may not provide reliable estimates of average firm-level parameters, if the composition of producers with different levels of productivity changes over the business cycle. I examine plant-level data and show that, due to the countercyclical reallocation of output among heterogenous plants, productivity measures based ...

The problem of choosing an appropriate total order is crucial for many applications that make use of extensions of fuzzy sets. In this work we introduce the concept of an admissible order as a total order that extends the usual partial order between intervals. We propose a method to build these admissible orders in terms of two aggregation functions and we prove that some of the most used examp...

This article discusses the use of Bayesian methods for estimating logit demand models using aggregate data. We analyze two different demand systems: independent samples and consumer panel. Under the first system, there is a different and independent random sample of N consumers in each period and each consumer makes only a single purchase decision. Under the second system, the same N consumers ...

While the role of exports in promoting growth in general, and productivity in particular, has been investigated empirically using aggregate data for countries and industries for a long time, only recently have comprehensive longitudinal data at the firm level been used to look at the extent and causes of productivity differentials between exporters and their counterparts which sell on the domes...

For the last several years, a number of researchers have been interested in the various problems which arise when modelling aggregate-type data [1st SDBM], [2nd SDBM], [3rd SSDBM], [Rafanelli 89]. Since aggregate data is often derived by applying statistical aggregation (e.g. SUM, COUNT) and statistical analysis functions over micro-data [Wong 84] the aggregate data bases are also called "stati...

Before describing the contents of this issue, let me say that we are very pleased to have established relationships with the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the Southwest Search and Matching Group. These relationships allow us to have ongoing agendas as they will meet regularly throughout the years to come. The conferences we have with the Tepper School of Business a...