Deposit Insurance,Institutions, and Bank Interest Rates

Many recent institutional reforms of the financial system have relied on the introduction of an explicit scheme of deposit insurance. This instrument aims at two main targets, contributing to systemic stability and protecting depositors. However, it may also affect the interest rate spread in the banking system, which can be viewed as an indicator of either inefficiency or market power in this financial segment. This paper provides an empirical investigation of the effect of deposit insurance and other institutional and economic variables on bank interest rates across countries. We find that deposit insurance increases the lending–deposit spread in banking. The main effect seems to arise not from the deposit side though, but from an increase in the lending rate. We interpret this result as evidence of the presence of moral hazard problems related to this instrument. We also find that higher quality of institutions is associated with lower spreads, thus contributing to eroding sources of market power in the banking sector.     

Therapeutic Assessment with Children in Family Therapy

Therapeutic Assessment with Children (TA‐C) is a brief semi‐structured intervention in which psychological assessment is used to help families with children and adolescents to change. In this paper we introduce the TA‐C model, describe its semi‐structured format and exemplify how it can be applied by family therapists.     

Spaces of Pride: A Visual Ethnography of Gay Pride Parades in Italy and the United Kingdom

Gay pride parades represent an active site of production of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), intersexual and queer identities, featuring a spatial and social articulation of political and human rights claims. While the multiplication of these events in different countries suggests the existence of a coherent and cohesive community which shares the same collective identity beyond national borders, different patterns in the organisation, part-taking and social and political connotations given to these events can be observed in different contexts. By means of a comparative visual ethnography of Italian and British Gay Pride Parades, this article investigates how the creation, mobilisation and challenge of quasi-normative LGBT identities occur within the spatial context of gay pride marches. It is argued, in particular, that while gay pride parades are sites in which the socio-political status quo can be successfully challenged, participants are also faced with the possibility of falling prey to dynamics of identity commodification and homonationalism which may ultimately deprive their claims of their subversive potential.     

Heterogeneity,school-effects and the North/South achievement gap in Italian secondary education: evidence from a three-level mixed model

With the aim of assessing the extent of the differences in the context of Italian educational system, the paper applies multilevel modeling to a new administrative dataset, containing detailed information for more than 500,000 students at grade 6 in the year 2011/2012, provided by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of Educational System. Data are grouped by classes, schools and geographical areas. Different models for each area are fitted, in order to properly address the heteroscedasticity of the phenomenon. The results show that it is possible to estimate statistically significant “school effects”, i.e., the positive/negative association of attending a specific school and the student’s test score, after a case-mix adjustment. Therefore, the paper’s most important message is that school effects are different in terms of magnitude and types in the three geographical macro areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy) and are dependent on specific students’ and schools’ characteristics.     

Non-parametric regression on compositional covariates using Bayesian P-splines

Methods to perform regression on compositional covariates have recently been proposed using isometric log-ratios (ilr) representation of compositional parts. This approach consists of first applying standard regression on ilr coordinates and second, transforming the estimated ilr coefficients into their contrast log-ratio counterparts. This gives easy-to-interpret parameters indicating the relative effect of each compositional part. In this work we present an extension of this framework, where compositional covariate effects are allowed to be smooth in the ilr domain. This is achieved by fitting a smooth function over the multidimensional ilr space, using Bayesian P-splines. Smoothness is achieved by assuming random walk priors on spline coefficients in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. The proposed methodology is applied to spatial data from an ecological survey on a gypsum outcrop located in the Emilia Romagna Region, Italy.     

Contrasting the Gini and Zenga indices of economic inequality

The current financial turbulence in Europe inspires and perhaps requires researchers to rethink how to measure incomes, wealth, and other parameters of interest to policy-makers and others. The noticeable increase in disparities between less and more fortunate individuals suggests that measures based upon comparing the incomes of less fortunate with the mean of the entire population may not be adequate. The classical Gini and related indices of economic inequality, however, are based exactly on such comparisons. It is because of this reason that in this paper we explore and contrast the classical Gini index with a new Zenga index, the latter being based on comparisons of the means of less and more fortunate sub-populations, irrespectively of the threshold that might be used to delineate the two sub-populations. The empirical part of the paper is based on the 2001 wave of the European Community Household Panel data set provided by EuroStat. Even though sample sizes appear to be large, we supplement the estimated Gini and Zenga indices with measures of variability in the form of normal, t-bootstrap, and bootstrap bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals.     

Family Network Support and Mental Health Recovery

Family members often provide critical support to persons living with a serious mental illness. The focus of this study was to determine which dimensions of the family support network were most important to the recovery process from the perspective of the recovering person. Consumers of a community mental health program completed in-depth structured interviews that included separate measures of social network support and recovery. Consumers named an average of 2.6 family members on the social network, interacted with family on a weekly basis, and were quite satisfied with their contact. This study revealed that support and reciprocity with family members are important dimensions of a personal support network that relates to the recovery process.     

Physical activity is inversely related to drug consumption in elderly patients with cardiovascular events

Elderly patients with cardiovascular events are characterized by high drug consumptions. Whether high drug consumptions are related to physical activity is not known. In order to examine whether physical activity is related to drug consumption in the elderly, patients older than 65 years (n?=?250) with a recent cardiovascular event were studied. Physical activity was analyzed according to the Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly (PASE) score and related to drug consumption. PASE score was 72.4?±?45.0 and drug consumption was 8.3?±?2.2. Elderly patients with greater comorbidity took more drugs (8.7?±?2.1) and are less active (PASE?=?64.4?±?50.6) than patients with Cumulative Illness Rating Scale severity score higher than 1.8 than those with a score lower than 1.8 (76.3?±?41.4, p?<?0.05, and 8.0?±?2.0, p?=?0.006, respectively). Multivariate analysis correlation confirmed that PASE score is negatively associated with drug consumption (β?=??0.149, p?=?0.031), independently of several variables including comorbidity. Thus, physical activity is inversely related to drug consumption in elderly patients with cardiovascular events. This inverse relationship may be attributable to the high degree of comorbidity observed in elderly patients in whom poor level of physical activity and high drug consumption are predominant.     

Assessing the pattern of covariance matrices via an augmentation multiple testing procedure

This paper extends the scedasticity comparison among several groups of observations, usually complying with the homoscedastic and the heteroscedastic cases, in order to deal with data sets laying in an intermediate situation. As is well known, homoscedasticity corresponds to equality in orientation, shape and size of the group scatters. Here our attention is focused on two weaker requirements: scatters with the same orientation, but with different shape and size, or scatters with the same shape and size but different orientation. We introduce a multiple testing procedure that takes into account each of the above conditions. This approach discloses a richer information on the data underlying structure than the classical method only based on homo/heteroscedasticity. At the same time, it allows a more parsimonious parametrization, whenever the patterned model is appropriate to describe the real data. The new inferential methodology is then applied to some well-known data sets, chosen in the multivariate literature, to show the real gain in using this more informative approach. Finally, a wide simulation study illustrates and compares the performance of the proposal using data sets with gradual departure from homoscedasticity.