Bayesian modeling of university first-year students' grades after placement test

University first-year students grades are naturally correlated with the scores obtained at placement tests. Often this characteristic leads the university grades in the first exams to be asymmetrically distributed. Motivated by the analysis of grades of the basic Statistics examination of first-year students, we discuss informative priors for the shape parameter of the skew-normal model, a class of distribution which account for several degree of asymmetry. Our proposed prior leads to closed-form full-conditional posterior distributions, particularly useful in Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. A Gibbs sampling algorithm is discussed for the joint vector of parameters and the method is applied to a real data set from the School of Economics, University of Padua, Italy. Our analysis reveals that the correlation between the placement test and the grades of first-year students leads to a measurable positive skewness of the distribution of the university grades.     

Extreme mortality in nineteenth-century Africa: the case of Liberian immigrants

Several studies have examined the mortality of immigrants from Europe to Africa in the nineteenth century. This paper examines the level of mortality in Liberia of Africans who emigrated there from the United States. A life table is estimated from data collected by the American Colonization Society from 1820 to 1843. The analysis reflects the mortality experience of a population that is transplanted from one disease environment to another, more exacting, disease environment. The results of this analysis show that these Liberian immigrants experienced the highest mortality rates in accurately recorded human history.     

Trade and development in the world economy: Methodological features of Project DYNAMICO

The paper reports on the methodological features and early application of the model underlying the DYNAMICO Projects, which has been developed at the United Nations Secretariat to study the interaction between trade and development. In order to investigate alternative development strategies, scenarios are calculated year by year for the global economy and the ten regions covered in the model.Each year is represented by a block-angular linear programming problem, where the systemwide (or coupling) constraints represent the world market clearance conditions for nine tradable commodities. Each subblock of relations represents the economy of a given region. The Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition method is used to solve the system.Section 2 reviews the specifications of a typical regional subproblem. Each regional subproblem contains the following material balances; labor, land, and capital requirements; investment functions; the most important macroeconomic definitions; and several other restrictions to simulate policy constraints concerning both domestic and external economic activity.Decomposition methods may, in general, be viewed as resource-allocation procedures valuable to capture some of the essential features of decentralized decision-making. In the literature, two classes of such resource-allocation procedures have been proposed: primal (relying on quantity signals), and dual (relying on prices). Section 3 discusses some of the theory underlying the Dantzig-Wolfe method, which is a price-directive one.Section 4 describes in detail the particular solution method implemented in the model. At first, in a prelink phase, each regional subproblem is solved a number of times on the basis of     

Building an integral metatheory of management

The increasing fragmentation of organization theory seems not to be responding to the challenges and complexities of organizations and society. This article contends that integral theory can make an important contribution to our discipline and presents a metatheory that integrates all previous organizational knowledge in an integral, balanced and non-marginalizing framework. Using metatriangulation techniques it reviews management and organization theories, classifies them according to their underlying paradigms and integrates them in a new metatheory. The resulting theory called “3D Management” maintains that there are 3 basic and irreducible dimensions of management: science, arts and ethics which refer respectively to the techno-economical, the aesthetic-emotional and the moral aspects of organizational reality. The fourth management dimension, the spiritual dimension, integrates the Big Three in an essential unit and strives for unity and meaning. An assessment of the theory and a concluding discussion of its contributions and potential applications is provided.     

Investors’ expectations around quantitative easing: does liquidity injection affect European banks equally?

Journal of Management and Governance - The role of liquidity in the banking industry is increasingly under the spotlight since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007. Prior evidence offers...     

Quantile hidden semi-Markov models for multivariate time series

Statistics and Computing - Parametric regression, such as linear regression, plays an important role in statistics. The use of parametric regression models typically involves the specification of a...     

The Influence of Stakeholders on the Environmental Strategy of Service Firms: The Moderating Effects of Complexity,Uncertainty and Munificence*

Drawing on the resource‐based view of the firm, we examine how complexity, uncertainty and munificence in the general business environment moderate the association between a firm's stakeholder integration capability and its environmental strategy. Our data were drawn from 134 ski resorts in 12 countries in western Europe and North America. Our study finds that (1) an organizational capability of stakeholder integration is associated with a service firm's adoption of a proactive environmental strategy; (2) an uncertain business environment has a direct positive influence and a complex business environment has a direct negative influence on a firm's environmental strategy; and (3) complexity has a negative moderating influence on the relationship between a firm's stakeholder integration capability and its environmental strategy.