Luigi Einaudi Foundation

Recensione al volume di Serena Mocci, Donne e impero nell’Ottocento americano. La cultura politica di Lydia Maria Child e Margaret Fuller, Roma, Viella, 2023, 318 p.

Abstract Under the Public Sector Directive, public buyers are allowed to include sustainability considerations in their purchasing decisions within the limits of the principles of procurement. This framework allows criteria linked to the subject matter to be contractualised. Though different criteria are widely employed in public procurement within the umbrella of sustainable public procurement, the literature mostly focuses on stages leading to the contract award instead of considering the public contract as a document incorporating contractual obligations. On the other side, green and social commitments in (business) contracts are considerations that are not necessarily linked to the subject matter. Though their value is acknowledged, their enforcement proves to be challenging due to the restraints of contract law. By using European contract law as a reference point, this paper compares sustainability clauses in business contracts to sustainability clauses in public contracts – to determine whether the EU regime applicable to public contracts offers solutions to these hurdles.

We report on a playful introduction of optimization in a high school. The final event of this experience has been an orienteering competition, in which the decision-making component plays a central role. This type of event has been very involving, and it boosted the interest of the students toward operations research. After summarizing the activities in class that preceded the competition, we describe in detail the organization aspects and the outcome. We also provide a simple AMPL code that compares the choices made by the participants with their optimal trajectory, that is, the one maximizing the score with the same traveled distance.

Universities have become key elements in building regional innovation systems. However, even though academic research is important when firms choose universities as collaboration partners, a still open question in the literature is whether only top-tier universities are relevant for firm innovativeness. This paper investigates the effect of the volume of scientific publications on firm’s propensity to develop new product and processes and to what extent academic research has to be excellent in order to enhance local industrial innovation, taking into account that education may act as a channel of local university-based knowledge spillovers. Using data on manufacturing firms in seven European countries covering the period 2007–2009, a multivariate probit model is estimated to relate firm’s propensity to develop innovation to the level of provincial academic research and education. Results show that academic research has a direct impact on the firm’s propensity to develop innovation. Research at the second-tier university impacts product innovation more than that at first-tier one. Furthermore, the research output of the first-tier university exerts a detrimental effect on the development of process innovation whereas the research output of third- and lower-tier universities is beneficial. Research excellence, although very important, is not sufficient to explain university-based knowledge spillovers. It may be the case that academic research may enhance radical innovation of relatively few firms working on cutting-edge research, whereas less advanced academic research may be directly useful to incremental innovation of most local firms.