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In this paper we present the new release of CORPS (CORpus of tagged Political Speeches) that contains transcripts of political speeches tagged with audience reactions, such as APPLAUSE or LAUGHTER. The corpus has been built with the goal of allowing automatic processing of the stored data. These tags signal hot-spots about persuasive communication and can be usefully employed in many theoretical and applied fields, providing insights well beyond those of traditional word-count approaches. After introducing the main characteristics of the corpus and some quantitative descriptions, we discuss possible uses of this resource.

In the last decade, the District of Prato (an important industrial area in the neighborhood of Florence, Italy) suffered a deep shrinkage of exports and added value of the textile industry, the core of its economy. In this paper we aim to investigate if such a crisis entailed a firm downsizing (evaluated as number of employees) of the same industry and, possibly, of the overall economy of the District. For this purpose we use the Mover Stayer Model. Data are represented by two panels from ASIA-ISTAT data. The main results of the analysis are that: (1) the textile industry is affected by a relevant downsizing of the firm size; (2) such a process takes place through a slightly changed level of concentration; (3) the mentioned changes does not seem to spread to the overall economy.

In this paper, we address the manifold nature of knowledge through the analysis of four distinct but complementary phenomena (Internet hyperlinks, EPO co-patent applications, Erasmus students mobility and European research networks)which characterise knowledge as an intrinsic relational structure (directly) connecting people, institutions and (indirectly) regions across five European countries. We study the structure (in terms of density, centralisation, clustering, assortativity, centre-periphery and resilience) of these international knowledge flows through network analysis techniques and we test the influence of geographical distance as opposed to sectoral (based on the industrial distribution of innovative activity) and functional(based on the value of the European technological index) distances in shaping the strength of knowledge relations through a gravitational model. Network Analysis techniques applied to the configuration of international knowledge flows between European regions highlight the existence of a polarised hierarchical structure. By estimating a “gravity equation” model we demonstrate that, far from the claim of the “death of distance”, geographic distance is still relevant for determining the structure of inter-regional knowledge flows. Functional and, above all, sectoral distances play also a relevant role suggesting that knowledge flows easier between similar regions (according to their technological level and the industrial distribution of their innovation system).