The Role of Foreign Banks in Poland

The paper examines the process of the Polish banking sector's internationalisation, with a particular intention of describing incentives and the impact of foreign banks entry. In order to carry out an assessment of changes in the banking market structure and banks' performance, the study introduces arguments and motivations of foreign capital inflow into local financial systems with implications for the stability and the development of the banking sector. The role of foreign capital in the Polish economy derives from an analysis of the effects of foreign banks penetration, in terms of changes in competitiveness, efficiency, and stability of the banking sector. An assessment of concentration level and development prospects have also been included.     

Simultaneous inference on diversity of biological communities

In environmental statistics, surveys on the structure of biological communities are generally carried out by focusing on diversity indexes. A more complete analysis may be performed by means of an appropriate function giving a spectrum of different measures of diversity: diversity profiles. They can be expressed as a function of the unknown abundance vector of the ecological population. In this paper we develop a non parametric approach based on bootstrap in order to make inference on diversity profiles. The proposed procedure is applied on biological data of four parks in Milan, Italy.     

Pharmacological treatments of pathological gambling

Medication treatment studies have demonstrated short-term efficacy of various SRIs, opioid antagonists, and mood stabilizers in sub-samples of adult treatment seeking pathological gamblers. Pathological gambling is frequently comorbid with bipolar spectrum disorders, substance abuse/dependence, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and comorbidity may influence treatment response in pathological gambling. This review focuses on recent research examining the treatment of pathological gambling and highlights methodological challenges for future studies.     

看上去更像中国人

我不记得是从什么时候开始喜欢中国的,好像是某一天突然间对中国发生了浓厚的兴趣。当时我刚刚开始使用ICQ,渐渐地对上网聊天入了迷。很快好奇心和求知欲把我带出了国界——能够从网络上探寻异国文化的奥秘真是很奇妙,只要在键盘上敲敲字就可以和世界各地的人交朋友。至今我都不知道为什么会选择中国人作为我的第一个网友,也许是从他身上我发现了中国人的友善、好奇,从而对了解中国产生了浓厚的兴趣吧。我潜意识里觉得中国和意大利在很多方面非常相似,就好像是我的“第二故乡”一样。很快,我的中国网友越来越多了。我的首次中国之行始于2…     

When did coronavirus arrive in Europe?

Statistical Methods & Applications - The first cluster of coronavirus cases in Europe was officially detected on 21st February 2020 in Northern Italy, even if recent evidence showed sporadic...     

Belief‐Free Equilibria in Games With Incomplete Information

We define belief‐free equilibria in two‐player games with incomplete information as sequential equilibria for which players' continuation strategies are best replies after every history, independently of their beliefs about the state of nature. We characterize a set of payoffs that includes all belief‐free equilibrium payoffs. Conversely, any payoff in the interior of this set is a belief‐free equilibrium payoff. The characterization is applied to the analysis of reputations.     

Power and inequality in global value chains: Advancing the research agenda

Power is a central, but largely undertheorized, concept for scholars of global value chains (GVCs). In this introduction to a special issue on power and inequality in GVCs, the authors summarize the key insights from the articles gathered here and explain how the collection advances our understanding of the types and forms of power operating in GVCs and their effect on different dimensions of inequality.     

On two conjectures about perturbations of the stochastic growth rate

The stochastic growth rate describes long-run growth of a population that lives in a fluctuating environment. Perturbation analysis of the stochastic growth rate provides crucial information for population managers, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. This analysis quantifies the response of the stochastic growth rate to changes in demographic parameters. A form of this analysis deals with changes that only occur in some environmental states. Caswell put forth two conjectures about environment-specific perturbations of the stochastic growth rate. The conjectures link the stationary distribution of the stochastic environmental process with the magnitude of some environment-specific perturbations. This note disproves one conjecture and proves the other.