Pan‐European pension funds: Current situation and future prospects

The competitive pressures arising from European economic integration increasingly challenge the territorial sovereignty of national welfare states. This generates the need to situate domestic social security schemes amid the European Union's national and supranational as well as economic and social spaces. At the trans‐national level, the European Commission's 2003 Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision (IORP) Directive created the illusion that a single market for occupational pensions would shortly be within reach. This did not happen, however, as IORPs — being at one and the same time financial vehicles and social insurance institutions — embody the constitutional asymmetry between policies promoting market efficiency and policies promoting social protection. Whereas the elimination of financial and tax barriers has proceeded smoothly, harmonization of the social and labour components within the occupational pension domain did not occur, slowing down the development of pan‐European pension plans. Nonetheless the road towards a single occupational pension market is still open, with first positive results emerging from the greater involvement of corporate and supranational actors.     

Nesting patterns among Neotropical species assemblages: can reserves in urban areas be failing to protect anurans?

Nestedness among species assemblages implies that sites of lower species richness are subsets of richer sites in a regional species pool. This nestedness is a reflection of a non-random process of species loss as a consequence of factors that promote the disaggregation of assemblages. The impoverishment of assemblage diversity is more often observed in fragmented landscapes. This non-random process has important implications for conservation. We recorded 95 species of anurans across 22 protected areas, of which 11 sites were in an urban matrix and 11 were in a non-urban matrix. We found that sites in the urban matrix had lower richness and high values of nestedness with no spatial autocorrelation among geographic distances and species composition. Thus, species were non-randomly distributed across the landscape and a nested pattern was documented from non-urban matrix sites to urban matrix sites. The impoverishment of assemblages toward the urban matrix sites may suggest that protected areas in an urban matrix are less suitable for anuran conservation than those in a non-urban matrix sites. Both the ecological revitalization of protected areas in urban matrix and protection of non-urban forested sites are needed for the conservation of Neotropical anurans.     

Bayesian non-parametric inference for species variety with a two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet process prior

Summary.  A Bayesian non-parametric methodology has been recently proposed to deal with the issue of prediction within species sampling problems. Such problems concern the evaluation, conditional on a sample of size n , of the species variety featured by an additional sample of size m . Genomic applications pose the additional challenge of having to deal with large values of both n and m . In such a case the computation of the Bayesian non-parametric estimators is cumbersome and prevents their implementation. We focus on the two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet model and provide completely explicit expressions for the corresponding estimators, which can be easily evaluated for any sizes of n and m . We also study the asymptotic behaviour of the number of new species conditionally on the observed sample: such an asymptotic result, combined with a suitable simulation scheme, allows us to derive asymptotic highest posterior density intervals for the estimates of interest. Finally, we illustrate the implementation of the proposed methodology by the analysis of five expressed sequence tags data sets.     

Subjective beliefs and confidence when facts are forgotten

Forgetting can be a salient source of uncertainty for subjective beliefs, confidence, and ambiguity attitudes. To investigate this, we run several experiments where people bet on propositions (facts) that they cannot recall with certainty. We use betting preferences to infer subjects’ revealed beliefs and their revealed confidence in these beliefs. Forgetting is induced via interference tasks and time delays (up to one year). We observe a natural memory decay pattern where beliefs become less accurate and confidence is reduced as well. Moreover, we find a form of comparative ignorance where subjects are more ambiguity averse when they cannot recall the truth rather than never having learnt it. In a different vein, we identify an overconfidence pattern: on average, subjects overpay for bets on propositions that they believe in, but underpay for the opposite bets. We formulate a two-signal behavioral model of forgetting that generates all of these patterns. It suggests new testable hypotheses that are confirmed by our data.

     

“Westernizations” from Peter I to Meiji: war,political competition,and institutional change

Radical “Westernizing” transformations in extra-European countries, from Peter I’s Russia to Meiji Japan, are traditionally presented as a response to pressures from the more militarily and technologically advanced European powers. This corresponds to the general tendency to view war as the driving force behind early modern state-building. However, the question remains: how exactly did such transformations happen, and what explains their timing? Why did some countries, such as Russia, embark on radical institutional restructuring that threatened large sections of the traditional military classes in the absence of any obvious existential threat, while in others even clear and immediate dangers failed to ignite a full-scale “Westernization”? This article seeks to complicate the “bellicist” narrative of “Westernizing” transformations and to generalize about the role of elite conflict in propelling “self-strengthening” reforms. It argues that “Westernizations” in extra-European polities were enabled by breakdown of domestic political balance and driven by “challengers” emerging in the course of these conflicts, as they strove to maximize their power. Factional struggles accompanying “Westernizations” are interpreted here not as a conservative reaction against reforms, but as a process that preceded and enabled institutional restructuring.     

Absolute Risk or Relative Risk? A Study of Intraspecies and Interspecies Extrapolation of Chemical‐Induced Cancer Risk

We have used the CBDS database of the National Toxicology Program to study the difference between absolute risk and relative risk models for interspecies and intersex predictions of cancer risk. For no combination (class) of tumor and site is the prediction good for all chemicals. The variation in predicted risk between chemicals exceeds the difference in risks resulting from application of these two models. On the whole, it appears that relative risk is a better model.     

Darwinism,organizational evolution and survival: key challenges for future research

How do social organizations evolve? How do they adapt to environmental pressures? What resources and capabilities determine their survival within dynamic competition? Charles Darwin’s seminal work The Origin of Species (1859) has provided a significant impact on the development of the management and organization theory literatures on organizational evolution. This article introduces the JMG Special Issue focused on Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival. We discuss key themes in the organizational evolution research that have emerged in recent years. These include the increasing adoption of the co-evolutionary approach, with a particular focus on the definition of appropriate units of analysis, such as routines, and related challenges associated with exploring the relationship between co-evolution, re-use of knowledge, adaptation, and exaptation processes. We then introduce the three articles that we have finally accepted in this Special Issue after an extensive, multi-round, triple blind-review process. We briefly outline how each of these articles contributes to understanding among scholars, practitioners and policy makers of the continuous evolutionary processes within and among social organizations and systems.     

Influence of testosterone substitution on glycemic control and endothelial markers in men with newly diagnosed functional hypogonadism and type 2 diabetes mellitus: a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Effects of testosterone (T) on the cardiovascular system of men remain controversial. The impact of T-replacement therapy (TRT) in men with functional hypogonadism and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has to be elucidated. This study included 80 men (mean age 51.5?±?6.3 years) with newly diagnosed T2DM (according to ADA criteria) and functional hypogonadism (according to EAU criteria). Randomization: Group1 (n?=?40): TRT using 1%-transdermal T-gel (50?mg/day), Group2 (n?=?40) no TRT (controls). Dietary treatment applied to both. Parameters at baseline/after 9?months: anthropometric parameters, lipids and indicators of carbohydrate metabolism (fasting glucose, insulin, HbA1c, HOMA-IR), markers of adipose tissue and EnD (leptin, resistin, p- and e-selectin, ICAM- 1, VCAM- 1 and CRP). ANCOVA for repeated measurements revealed TRT to cause a significant decrease in waist circumference (WC), HOMA-IR and HbA1c vs controls (p?<?.001, p?=?.002, p?=?.004, respectively). Leptin declined in subjects receiving TRT vs controls (p?=?.04). Concentrations of resistin, ICAM-1, p-selectin and CRP decreased significantly vs controls (all p?<?.001); no effects for e-selectin and VCAM-1. Advanced age attenuated effects, higher delta testosterone levels augmented effects. Decrement of WC was related to decreasing markers of adipose tissue secretion/EnD. TRT in men with functional hypogonadism and T2DM improved carbohydrate metabolism and markers of endothelial dysfunction.     

Cognitive Mapping Tools: Review and Risk Management Needs

Risk managers are increasingly interested in incorporating stakeholder beliefs and other human factors into the planning process. Effective risk assessment and management requires understanding perceptions and beliefs of involved stakeholders, and how these beliefs give rise to actions that influence risk management decisions. Formal analyses of risk manager and stakeholder cognitions represent an important first step. Techniques for diagramming stakeholder mental models provide one tool for risk managers to better understand stakeholder beliefs and perceptions concerning risk, and to leverage this new understanding in developing risk management strategies. This article reviews three methodologies for assessing and diagramming stakeholder mental models—decision‐analysis‐based mental modeling, concept mapping, and semantic web analysis—and assesses them with regard to their ability to address risk manager needs.