The Impacts of the Basel II Accord on the Concentration of the Entrepreneurial and Banking System

From the econometric analysis model, even though based on the US economy, one deduces the existence of an important correlation between the intervened changes in the role of banks’ prudential capital and in merger and acquisition dealings: the latter have increased, at least in number, after the reviewing of prudential capital requirements in favour of better structured banking organizations. The analysis of the Italian entrepreneurial and banking system shows a country characterised by small-scale enterprises with meagre growth capability (even though the Accord, paradoxically, is meant to facilitate the granting of loans to the development of small-scale enterprises), but also by the great expanding potential of banking enterprises that, contrarily to the other productive entities, can count of high re-investible margins and, consequently, of wide capabilities of investing in private equity.      

Multiple Family Group Therapy in a Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre

In the last decade there has been increasing interest in working systemically with groups of families. Multiple family groups (MFGs) have been used in mental health settings with schizophrenia, eating disorders and drug and substance abuse. This article describes the MFG program used in Higher Ground Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Trust, a rehabilitation centre in Auckland, (New Zealand). Higher Ground provides an 18‐week residential therapeutic program for people with a severe substance abuse disorder. The MFG in Higher Ground focuses on developing better communication patterns and better boundaries between family members, fostering mutual support, and promoting self‐responsibility.     

Allocation and distribution: A discussion of the educational transition model,with reference to the Italian case

The main characteristic of education in the past century has been its expansion: a major stratification research question associated with this is whether the inequalities of educational opportunities among classes have persisted or changed (diminished) over time. The educational transition model (29 and 30), adopted by the majority of scholars in the field, separates the study of allocation, that is class inequality in education, from that of distribution, the amount of schooling and its expansion, using conditional logits. A consequence of the way this distinction has influenced subsequent research has been the emergence of a sharp gap between macro-level research on the expansion of education and stratification studies.     

Ausbildungssupervision im Fokus der Expertiseforschung

While supervision is well established in the formation of consultants and psychotherapists, it is seldom offered in trainer formation. Recent research on the behavior and cognition of experts in complex dynamic domains suggests that trainers widely use implicit knowledge structures for their professional activities. These structures, however, are not necessarily accessible to conscious reflection. Supervision respectively coaching supports changes of such implicit knowledge structures and also supports the development of professional expertise. It is recommended to implement such support and counseling as an obligatory requirement in the formation of trainers.     

Recoverable robust timetabling for single delay: Complexity and polynomial algorithms for special cases

In this paper, we study the problem of planning a timetable for passenger trains considering that possible delays might occur due to unpredictable circumstances. If a delay occurs, a timetable could not be able to manage it unless some extra time has been scheduled in advance. Delays might be managed in several ways and the usual objective function considered for such purpose is the minimization of the overall waiting time caused to passengers. We analyze the timetable planning problem in terms of the recoverable robustness model, where a timetable is said to be recoverable robust if it is able to absorb small delays by possibly applying given limited recovery capabilities. The quality of a robust timetable is measured by the price of robustness that is the ratio between the cost of the recoverable robust timetable and that of a non-robust optimal one.     

Karrierecoaching im Spannungsfeld zwischen beruflichem Ehrgeiz und Privatleben

Career coaching between professional ambition and private lifeThe ever continuing pressure to perform is a major conflict for more and more executives in balancing their professional and their private lives; sometimes even the performance itself suffers from this conflict. The author shows by a case study how executives can cope quickly with this stress and how they can find satisfying solutions with the help of a career coach.     

Health care service and ethnic minorities: The case of Austria

The present article delineates the way in which a number of factors—societal as well as individual—define the health profile of ethnic minorities as well as hinder their access to and appropriation of an adequate health care service. It is based on an exploratory study—the first of its kind to be carried out in Austria—undertaken by ‘The Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences’ on the subject of ‘Foreigners and Health’.     

Self‐Report and Observational Assessment of Couples' Conflict: The Concordance Between the Communication Patterns Questionnaire and the KPI Observation System

The purpose of the study is to provide a cross‐cultural replication of the correspondence between the Communication Patterns Questionnaire (CPQ) Constructive Communication Subscale and an observational measure of constructive communication. Eighty‐one couples in two German cities completed the CPQ, a self‐report measure of couples' conflictual communication, and participated in a 15‐minute, videotaped interaction in which they discussed a current problem. A microanalytic coding system, the Kategoriensystem fuer Partnerschaftliche Interaktion (KPI), was used to classify each unit of behavior in the videotaped interactions. Correlations were computed between subscales on the CPQ and summary categories on the KPI. The correlations were generally supportive of the CPQ as a measure of couples' communication. In particular, the Constructive Communication Subscale of the CPQ and a summary measure of constructiveness on the KPI were correlated at .51.     

Likelihood‐Based Estimation of Latent Generalized ARCH Structures

GARCH models are commonly used as latent processes in econometrics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Yet no exact likelihood analysis of these models has been provided so far. In this paper we outline the issues and suggest a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm which allows the calculation of a classical estimator via the simulated EM algorithm or a Bayesian solution in O(T) computational operations, where T denotes the sample size. We assess the performance of our proposed algorithm in the context of both artificial examples and an empirical application to 26 UK sectorial stock returns, and compare it to existing approximate solutions.