Socioeconomic Status,Income Inequality,and Health Complaints: A Basic Psychological Needs Perspective

Socioeconomic status (SES) and income inequality are now recognized as important determinants of health, and there is growing interest in uncovering the intermediary psychosocial pathways through which the socioeconomic context affects physical well-being (Marmot in The status syndrome: how social standing affects our health and longevity, Henry Holt, New York, 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, Allen Lane, London, 2009). We adopted the applied framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci and Ryan in Psychol Inq 11:227–268, 2000) and hypothesized that fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness would mediate the relationships that SES and income inequality have to self-rated health. An online community sample of American participants (N = 1,139) completed a detailed demographic survey and provided self-reports of need fulfillment and health complaints. Structural equation models controlled for impression management and self-deceptive enhancement. Controlling for sex and age, need fulfillment was predicted positively by subjective SES and objective household income and negatively by state-level income inequality; in turn, need fulfillment predicted lower levels of health complaints. These findings suggest that SDT provides a useful framework for the study of SES, income inequality, and health, and that basic psychological needs are an important mechanism through which socioeconomic contexts influence health.     

Inferential Issues on CUBE Models with Covariates

We introduce cube models with covariates, a class of discrete mixture distributions able to take uncertainty and overdispersion of ordinal data into account. The main result of the paper concerns the analytical derivation of the observed variance–covariance matrix of this model, a necessary step for the asymptotic inference about estimated parameters and model validation. We emphasize some computational aspects of the procedure and discuss the usefulness of the approach on a real case study.     

‘I'm Not Just a Housewife’: Gendered Roles and Identities in the Home‐Based Hospitality Enterprise

This article explores an under‐researched form of commercial hospitality provision by analysing the gender dynamics in the distinctive occupational setting of the home. The primary contribution is to extend understanding of traditionally female occupations by adding to accounts in the literature on gendered identities and occupational roles in small and micro enterprises. It is based on in‐depth interview findings from 33 home‐based commercial hospitality proprietors in Scotland. These enterprises perform the twin functions of private home and providing revenue‐generating, short‐term accommodation. The findings reveal three broad categories of proprietor; the female sole proprietor, proprietor couples and the male sole proprietor, all of whom reinforce traditional gender‐based roles and stereotypes. As an extension of domestic labour, commercial ‘home hosting’ is inherently gendered. It is argued that this is very pronounced in home‐based commercial hospitality where home and business spheres overlap.     

Analysis of mutual funds’ management styles: a modeling,ranking and visualizing approach

A method to rank mutual funds according to their investment style measured with respect to the returns of a reference portfolio (benchmark) is introduced. It is based on a style analysis model estimating a mutual fund portfolio composition as well as the benchmark one. Starting from such compositions, it computes a proximity measure based on the L ₁ or L ₂ norm to assess the similarity between each mutual fund portfolio returns and the benchmark returns as well as between the returns of each benchmark constituent and that of the corresponding mutual fund constituent. To this purpose the mean integrated absolute error and the mean integrated squared error are computed to derive both a global ranking of mutual fund management styles and partial rankings expressing the over- (under-) weighting of each portfolio constituent. A visual inspection of the results emphasizing main differences in management styles is provided, using a parallel coordinates plot. Since a modeling, a ranking and a visualizing approach are integrated, the method is named MoRaViA. From the practitioners’ point of view, it allows the identification of a specific management style for each mutual fund, discriminating active management funds from passive management ones. To evaluate the effectiveness of MoRaViA, many sets of artificial portfolios are generated and an application on a set of equity funds operating in the European market is presented.     

Locking down adolescents: Victims,irresponsible subjects,or just social actors

The article presents the results of a qualitative study investigating the experiences of a sample of Italian adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were analysed in the light of the two social representations (adolescents as criminals and as victims) that permeated the Italian public debate throughout the outbreak. The findings showed the ability of boys and girls in dealing with the relationships altered by the pandemic constraints and in adapting to different regulations. This demonstrated their competence as social actors, neither criminals nor victims, who were also able to cope with the coronavirus risk in safeguarding their significant others.