HIV seroprevalence and risk behaviors among clients attending a clinic for the homeless in Miami/Dade County,Florida, 1990–1996

In the early 1990s, HIV seroprevalence was highest at the Miami homeless clinic among 16 homeless sites participating in a nationwide sentinel survey. To examine dynamic seroprevalence patterns in Miami's homeless clients in relation to demographics and risk behaviors over six years, we analyzed data from an unlinked (blinded) serosurvey of clients attending the principal primary care clinic serving Miami's homeless. Data were from 3,797 medical encounters with homeless persons who, on their initial clinic visit within an annual survey period, received routine serologic testing and a risk behavior survey. Overall HIV seroprevalence was 15.9% and infection rates for men (16.4%) and women (14.5%) did not differ. Seroprevalence for blacks (19.9%) was significantly higher than for Hispanics (9.1%) or whites (8.3%) (p < 0.0001). Seroprevalence was 12.6% (35 times the national rate) for clients reporting heterosexual contact as their only risk. Significant increases in seroprevalence, above this heterosexual-contact-only 'baseline', were found for clients disclosing high-risk behaviors: male-to-male sex, drug injection, receiving or giving money/drugs for sex, and sexual contact with a drug injector or HIV-infected partner (p < 0.0001). Seroprevalence declined over six years from 23.2 to 7.2% (p < 0.0001). Significant downward trends were observed for men and women, blacks and Hispanics, men who have sex with men, and clients reporting heterosexual contact. The proportion of clients reporting high-risk behaviors decreased sharply (p < 0.0001). Elevated HIV seroprevalence in Miami's homeless clients was strongly associated with high-risk behaviors. Expansion of HIV prevention and HIV/drug treatment services for homeless persons is strongly recommended.     

Fiscal Sustainability and Immigration in the Madrid Region

The growing number of immigrants in the Madrid region raises several questions concerning the welfare of future native generations. The debates shift from increasing concern about the congestion of public services like education or healthcare, to how immigration helps to ease tension in relation to financing those services and other benefits to the region's general welfare. In order to evaluate the global effect, our analysis uses a generational accounting method which is applied to different productivity, interest rate and growth scenarios. The results show that the impact of immigrants is positive, with intergenerational distribution towards the currently most active taxpayers.     

Voices of Nigerian Women Survivors of Trafficking Held in Italian Centres for Identification and Expulsion

This article examines the vicissitudes that affect the migration trajectories of many Nigerian women who experienced trafficking before arriving in Italy, and end up in Centers for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) for undocumented migrants. Their life stories, collected within the CIE of Ponte Galeria (Rome), revealed violence as “a rule of action” with which these women are obliged to cope with at different levels. Moreover, they highlighted the failure of traditional security approaches to human trafficking, and the necessity to rethink the measures adopted to ensure survivors' protection and rights. As it is conceived, the system of immigration control prevents the full guarantee of survivors' rights, often labelling them as “illegal migrants”. Finally, there is the need to extend protection to all survivors of human trafficking even if the crime against them has not happened in Italy.     

A new continuous distribution on the unit interval applied to modelling the points ratio of football teams

We introduce a new flexible distribution to deal with variables on the unit interval based on a transformation of the sinh–arcsinh distribution, which accommodates different degrees of skewness and kurtosis and becomes an interesting alternative to model this type of data. We also include this new distribution into the generalised additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) framework in order to develop and fit its regression model. For different parameter settings, some simulations are performed to investigate the behaviour of the estimators. The potentiality of the new regression model is illustrated by means of a real dataset related to the points rate of football teams at the end of a championship from the four most important leagues in the world: Barclays Premier League (England), Bundesliga (Germany), Serie A (Italy) and BBVA league (Spain) during three seasons (2011–2012, 2012–2013 and 2013–2014).     

Associations of Migrants in Spain: An Enquiry into Their Digital Inclusion in the “Network Society” in the 2010s

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This paper explores the way that associations of migrants in Spain (AMS) in the 2010 decade integrate into the Network...     

From social capital to entrepreneurial orientation: The mediating role of dynamic capabilities

This paper analyzes how social capital and its three dimensions—structural, relational, and cognitive—affect entrepreneurial orientation through dynamic capabilities. We specifically analyzed the effect of each dimension of social capital on firms' entrepreneurial orientation and the mediating effect of dynamic capabilities to explain these relationships. This study was conducted on a sample of firms in the Spanish agri-food industry. The results of the empirical analysis show that dynamic capabilities are generated by firms' social capital. Dynamic capabilities lead relational and cognitive social capital to develop a higher entrepreneurial orientation. The negative effect of structural social capital can only be countered if firms build and develop dynamic capabilities.     

The Influence of Service Orientation on B2B e‐Service Capabilities: An Empirical Investigation

E‐Services, or the company's portfolio of service offerings available to its customers through the Internet, are an emerging area of interest to operations management. Yet little is known about the operations and capabilities needed for provision of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐services. This paper aims to make a contribution toward closing this gap. First, we develop a new construct of B2B e‐service capability, a term that captures a generic set of five interrelated and complementary dimensions: (1) e‐service recovery, (2) e‐customization, (3) ease of navigation, (4) service portfolio comprehensiveness, and (5) information richness. These combined operational abilities are associated with B2B service delivery, including its portal design, technology architecture, and mix of product and service offerings. They are posited to be necessary for delivering effective B2B e‐services. We also argue that, both service orientation (SO) and customer receptivity to technology, influence B2B e‐service capability. We empirically test a path model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 181 businesses that have deployed B2B e‐services. We find that the influence of SO on performance is not direct but rather mediated by the e‐service capability, a finding that holds for both goods producers and service providers. We suggest that a firm's SO may mitigate industrial customers' resistance toward conducting business online.     

On the Choice of the Ridge Parameter: A Maximum Entropy Approach

In this article, a new method to estimate the ridge parameter, based on the ridge trace and an analytical method borrowed from maximum entropy, is presented. The performance of the new estimator is illustrated through a Monte Carlo simulation study and an empirical application to the well-known Portland cement data set.     

Model-Based Estimation of Unemployment Rates in Small Areas of Portugal

The high level of unemployment is a major problem in most European countries nowadays. Hence, the demand for small area labor market statistics has rapidly increased over the past few years. The Portuguese Labour Force Survey is the main source of official statistics at the macro level. However, it was not designed to produce reliable design-based statistics at the micro level due to small sample sizes. The goal of this article is to analyze the performance of model-based small area estimators to estimate the unemployment rate at micro level. Our results showed that the temporal estimator is the most suitable.