Urban homelessness: The negotiation of public spaces

Homeless people usually live in the urban public space. Properly, public space does not belong to any peculiar social group. Public space is designed to let people circulate, and its borders change quickly. Homeless people who live in the public space break up its rules and transform it into their private environment. That is why homeless are often considered “unbearable people” by others. If homeless people want to go on living in the public space they must learn to be invisible to the others. If they want to survive in their “privatized” public space they must not intrude in everyday life routines. This article tries to visualize the symbols which flexibly define the borders between public and private space.     

Distribution of Illiquid Financial Products: The Case of Italy

The investment in illiquid financial products introduces multiple profiles of criticality related to the perception of the effective profiles of risk and to the intermediaries’ distributive policies. However, the notion of illiquid product could be affected by some misunderstanding such as the tendency (which constitutes a simplification) to identify it to the trading venue, for which are illiquid only those products negotiated over the counter. In actual fact, it is necessary to estimate an instrument on the base of its characteristics, those of the issuer and the eventual market of negotiation. From a substantial point of view, this has some important implications regarding the regulatory profiles of investor’s protection. The Mifid in Europe set conduct rules to align the behavior of the intermediary regarding the objective to best serve the investor. The harmonization of the conduct rules passes from the implementation of level 3 measures. This paper examines the problem to the light of the implementation of level 3 measures in Italy.     

Banks and the Value Chain in the Securities Industry: The Italian Case

The provision of investment services (and the correlated ancillary services) and collective investment services forms part of the main functions carried out by the securities industry. From an industrial point of view, all the activities defining the securities industry represent subsequent stages of the production process of the industry. The financial exchange sensu stricto uses the orders originating from the investment decisions produced in the asset allocation stages as input for the production process and, in turn, is divided into the order capture, order execution and order processing stages. The presence of banking intermediaries characterizes all the stages of the production process of the securities industry. This, of course, has implications in terms of profitability of the banking groups and affects their competitive strategies.     

Aggregate statistical data: models for their representation

The paper gives a review of a number of data models for aggregate statistical data which have appeared in the computer science literature in the last ten years.After a brief introduction to the data model in general, the fundamental concepts of statistical data are introduced. These are called statistical objects because they are complex data structures (vectors, matrices, relations, time series, etc) which may have different possible representations (e.g. tables, relations, vectors, pie-charts, bar-charts, graphs, and so on). For this reason a statistical object is defined by two different types of attribute (a summary attribute, with its own summary type and with its own instances, called summary data, and the set of category attributes, which describe the summary attribute). Some conceptual models of statistical data (CSM, SDM4S), some semantic models of statistical data (SCM, SAM*, OSAM*), and some graphical models of statistical data (SUBJECT, GRASS, STORM) are also discussed.     

Mending Nets in the South: Anti-poverty Policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain

The marginal role of social assistance and the absence of minimum income programmes have long been thought to constitute defining characteristics of the southern European model of welfare. Nevertheless, over the 1990s significant innovations in this field have taken place. The paper aims to contribute to the analysis of recent developments by critically examining the experience of anti‐poverty policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. It is argued that the “patchiness” of safety nets in southern Europe is due to a unique set of constraints, the most relevant of which are the role of families and the “softness” of state institutions. A review of national profiles reveals that new policies introduced in all four countries mark progress towards redressing some of the historical imbalances of that welfare model. In particular, fully fledged minimum income schemes now operate in Portugal and in certain Spanish regions, while an experiment involving a number of Italian municipalities is still in progress. In spite of this, the paper concludes that social safety nets in southern Europe remain frail in terms of institutional design as well as political support and legitimacy.     

Structural Changes in Economic Growth and Well-Being: The Case of Italy’s Parabola

Social Indicators Research - The controversies on the relationship (called ‘gradient’) between the time trend of GDP and of subjective well-being oppose those who claim that the...     

ASSET DYNAMICS,LIQUIDITY, AND INEQUALITY IN DECENTRALIZED MARKETS

The Kiyotaki and Wright model has exerted a considerable influence on the monetary search literature. We argue that the model also delivers important insights into a broader range of macroeconomic and development issues. The analysis studies how market frictions and the liquidity of assets affect the distribution of income. Experiments illustrate how the economy adjusts to shocks to asset returns and to the matching technology. They also deal with long‐run transition. An experiment interprets the reversal of fortune hypothesis as a situation in which an economy with a low‐return asset takes over a similar economy with a high‐return asset. (JEL C61, C63, E41, E27, D63)     

A Bayesian approach for non-homogeneous gamma degradation processes

A Bayesian approach based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique is proposed for the non-homogeneous gamma process with power-law shape function. Vague and informative priors, formalized on some quantities having a “physical” meaning, are provided. Point and interval estimation of process parameters and some functions thereof are developed, as well as prediction on some observable quantities that are useful in defining the maintenance strategy is proposed. Some useful approximations are derived for the conditional and unconditional mean and median of the residual life to reduce computational time. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a real dataset.     

Prescribing the Families Own Dysfunctional Rules as a Therapeutic Strategy*

The use of paradox-strategy in therapy is motivated by the fact that many families request help but at the same time seem to reject all offers of help. The therapist may be drawn into a game in which every effort on his part to act as an agent of change is nullified by the family group. In systemic terms these contradictory attitudes derive from the dynamic equilibrium existing between the tendency toward change, which is implicit in the request for help at one level, and the tendency toward homeostasis which at another level imposes the repetition of the family's habitual rules of interaction. The coexistence of these forces can entangle the therapist in the family's paradoxical logic of “help me to change, but without changing anything.” By accepting the contradiction facing him and by “uniting” himself with this within the family, the therapist puts himself into a position opposite to that which the family expects. His response to the family's paradoxical request is a paradox, or counterparadox, because it creates the contradictory communication typical of rigid family systems. By prescribing its own dysfunctional rules to the family, the therapist can stimulate the tendencies toward change present in the family system.