Ambiguity in asset pricing and portfolio choice: a review of the literature

We survey the literature that has explored the implications of decision-making under ambiguity for financial market outcomes, such as portfolio choice and equilibrium asset prices. This ambiguity literature has led to a number of significant advances in our ability to rationalize empirical features of asset returns and portfolio decisions, such as the failure of the two-fund separation theorem in portfolio decisions, the modest exposure to risky securities observed for a majority of investors, the home equity preference in international portfolio diversification, the excess volatility of asset returns, the equity premium and the risk-free rate puzzles, and the occurrence of trading break-downs.     

Does business model affect accounting choices? An empirical analysis of European listed companies

Financial accounting research increasingly includes business model (BM) constructs, but the ability of financial reporting to capture BM characteristics has not been verified. This study empirically explores the links between BMs and accounting choices by clustering a sample of 103 European listed companies according to an innovative, nonlinear algorithm (self-organizing map) that uses pertinent industrial, strategic, governance, and financial variables to uncover different dimensions of a BM. The authors investigate accounting choices (accounting measurement, accounting treatment, and disclosure level) by companies that belong to the different identified BMs. The analysis of the relations between different company BMs and their accounting choices indicates no significant connections, which offers empirical confirmation of the criticisms regarding the inability of financial reporting to represent (or even consider) a company’s BM. The results suggest further attempt to capture BM in financial reporting, which requires regulators to establish accounting standards that acknowledge the value creation processes of an entity and incentivize managers to represent those processes.     

A spatial analysis on Italian unemployment differences

Using spatial econometric models, this paper focuses attention on the spatial structure of provincial unemployment disparities of Italian provinces for the year 2003. On the basis of findings from the economic literature and of the available socio-economic data, various model specifications including supply- and demand-side variables are tested. Further we use ESDA analysis as equivalent to integration analysis on time series; therefore it is applied on each variable, dependent and independent, involved in the statistical model. The suggestions of ESDA lead us to the most adequate statistical model, which estimates indicate that there is a significant degree of neighbouring effect (i.e. positive spatial correlation) among labour markets at the provincial level in Italy; this effect is present notwithstanding we controlled for local characteristics. The unemployment shows a polarized spatial pattern that is strongly connected to labour demand and to a much lesser extent to the share of young population and economic structural composition.     

School-to-work transitions in times of crisis: the case of Spanish youth without qualifications

This article focuses on the school-to-work transitions of Spanish youth. Herein, we study the pathways followed during a 10-year period by young people who dropped out of school without achieving any qualifications and who did not achieve any at a later date. This is a population aged 26–28 years old with an educational level of ISCED 0–1. The study adopts a plurimethodological approach that includes an initial qualitative phase whose main instrument was the biographical interview and a second phase with a quantitative focus in which data were collected using a questionnaire. The results show the effect of dropping out of education without qualifications on the pathways of the youths as well as their greater vulnerability in the current period of economic crisis, which results in a high percentage of the population that has no employment, education or training. This effect is even greater among women. This study highlights the difficulties associated to returning to education, the reproduction of educational exclusion in the population that did not obtain the diploma corresponding to compulsory secondary education, and a lack of public policies to support this specific population.     

Dropout of Hospital Volunteers in Italy

Voluntary work in Charities is a constantly growing reality: in particular, in the last few years, voluntary work in hospitals has become of great importance, marking a substantial increase of commitment in social issues. However, at the same time, volunteering Charities have been plagued by the increase of the phenomenon of dropout, that is, volunteers abandoning the Charitable Association they’re working in, often after a relatively short period of activity. In this study, we attempted to verify if and how active and dropped out volunteers perceive their own activity as a source of anxiety and stress. Our data show that both active and dropped out volunteers show high levels of burnout; in fact, dropped out volunteers show higher levels of burnout, especially of emotional exhaustion, in comparison with active volunteers. Subsequently, we identified the factors potentially assuming the role of mediators or moderators in the direct relation involving the status of voluntary work activity and the levels of anxiety and burnout. Our study demonstrates that coping strategies and the relationship established with hospital workers can be considered good moderators.     

The analysis of extreme pollution levels: A case study

Our case study focuses on Milan. Italian law specifies strict guidelines for the permissibility of high levels of a variety of air pollutants in cities. In Milan, a highly sophisticated network of recording stations has been constructed to monitor pollutant levels. The aim of this paper is to obtain a summary of the temporal behaviour of the pollutant series, with particular reference to extreme levels. Simple exploratory analysis reveals a number of sources of stochastic variation and possible dependence on covariate effects, which are subsequently modelled, exploiting recent developments in the modelling and inference for temporal extremes. Using this methodology, we examine the issues of data trends, non-stationarity, meteorological effects and temporal dependence, all of which have substantive implications in the design of pollution control regulations. Moreover, the asymptotic basis of these extreme value models justifies the interpretation of our results, even at levels that are exceptionally high.     

Anomaly and Novelty detection for robust semi-supervised learning

Statistics and Computing - Three important issues are often encountered in Supervised and Semi-Supervised Classification: class memberships are unreliable for some training units (label noise), a...     

Is Participation Without Power Good Enough? Introduction to “Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation”

This introduction to the section Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation sketches a contemporary enthusiasm for participation that reaches across business, education, popular culture, and politics. The article tries to account for what makes this enthusiasm new and begins to sketch its implications for what people want and expect from their political and economic institutions.     

“Free spaces” in collective action

Theory and Society -