arXiv subjects

Luca De Benedictis

Publications and source records attributed to Luca De Benedictis.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Environmental migration? An overview of the literature

The literature on the relationship between environmental factors such as climatic changes and natural hazards and human mobility (both internal and international) is characterized by heterogeneous results: some contributions highlight the role of climate changes as a driver of migratory flows, while others underline how this impact is mediated by geographical, economic and the features of the environmental shock. This paper attempts to map this literature, focusing on economics and empirical essays. The paper improves on the existing literature: (a) providing systematic research of the literature through main bibliographic databases, followed by a review and bibliometric analysis of all resulting papers; (b) building a citation-based network of contributions, that hollows to identify four separate clusters of paper; (c) applying meta-analysis methods on the sample of 96 papers released between 2003 and 2020, published in an academic journal, working papers series or unpublished studies, providing 3,904 point estimates of the effect of slow-onset events and 2,065 point estimates of the effect of fast-onset events. Overall, the meta-analytic average effect estimates a small impact of slow- and rapid-onset variables on migration, however positive and significant. When the clustering of the literature is accounted for, however, a significant heterogeneity emerges among the four clusters of papers, giving rise to new evidence on the formation of club-like convergence of literature outcomes.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2023

Joint modelling of national cultures accounting for within and between-country heterogeneity

Cultural values vary significantly around the world. Despite a large heterogeneity, similarities across national cultures are present. This paper studies cross-country culture heterogeneity via the joint inference of country-specific copula graphical models from world-wide survey data. To this end, a random graph generative model of the cultural networks is introduced, with a latent space and proximity measures that embed cultural relatedness across countries. Within-country heterogeneity is also accounted for, via parametric modelling of the marginal distributions of each cultural trait. All together, the different components of the model are able to identify several dimensions of culture.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Cultures as networks of cultural traits: A unifying framework for measuring culture and cultural distances

Making use of the information from the World Value Survey (WVS), and operationalizing a definition of national culture that encompasses both the relevance of specific cultural traits and the interdependence among them, this paper proposes a methodology to reveal the latent structure of national culture and to measure cultural distance between countries that takes into account both the difference in cultural traits and the difference in the network structure of national cultures. Exploiting the possibilities offered by copula graphical models for discrete data, this paper infers the cultural networks of all the countries included in the WVS (Wave 6) and proposes a novel unifying framework to measure national culture and international cultural distances. The Jeffreys' divergence between copula graphical models, taken as the measure of cultural distance between countries, captures the orthogonality of the two components of cultural distance: the one based on cultural traits and the one based on the network structure among them. Moreover, the two components are shown to correlate with different national and structural characteristics of cultural networks, thus encompassing the different informational sets related to national cultures.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2022

From the historical Roman road network to modern infrastructure in Italy

An integrated and widespread road system, like the one built during the Roman Empire in Italy, plays an important role today in facilitating the construction of new infrastructure. This paper investigates the historical path of Roman roads as main determinant of both motorways and railways in the country. The empirical analysis shows how the modern Italian transport infrastructure followed the path traced in ancient times by the Romans in constructing their roads. Being paved and connecting Italy from North to South, consular trajectories lasted in time, representing the starting physical capital for developing the new transport networks.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

Inclusive Universities. Evidence from the Erasmus Program

The Erasmus Program is the main international mobility program in Europe and worldwide. Since its launch in 1987, it has been growing both in terms of participants and budget devoted to its activities. However, despite the possibility to obtain additional funding, the participation of students with special needs to the program remains extremely low. This work quantifies the participation of these students to Erasmus and explores the network of universities involved in their mobility, along the period 2008-2013. In addition, it proposes a novel index to measure the level of inclusiveness of universities welcoming international students with disabilities. Quantifying and analyzing this aspect could be the basis for better designing targeted policies and for widening the participation of students with impairments to international mobility.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Gender bias in the Erasmus students network

The Erasmus Program (EuRopean community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), the most important student exchange program in the world, financed by the European Union and started in 1987, is characterized by a strong gender bias. Girls participate to the program more than boys. This work quantifies the gender bias in the Erasmus program between 2008 and 2013, using novel data at the university level. It describes the structure of the program in great details, carrying out the analysis across fields of study, and identifies key universities as senders and receivers. In addition, it tests the difference in the degree distribution of the Erasmus network along time and between genders, giving evidence of a greater density in the female Erasmus network with respect to the one of the male Erasmus network.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Segregation with Social Linkages: Evaluating Schelling's Model with Networked Individuals

This paper generalizes the original Schelling (1969, 1971a,b, 2006) model of racial and residential segregation to a context of variable externalities due to social linkages. In a setting in which individuals' utility function is a convex combination of a heuristic function a la Schelling, of the distance to friends, and of the cost of moving, the prediction of the original model gets attenuated: the segregation equilibria are not the unique solutions. While the cost of distance has a monotonic pro-status-quo effect, equivalent to that of models of migration and gravity models, if friends and neighbours are formed following independent processes the location of friends in space generates an externality that reinforces the initial configuration if the distance to friends is minimal, and if the degree of each agent is high. The effect on segregation equilibria crucially depends on the role played by network externalities.

econ.GN↗