Prevalence of Adolescent Problem Gambling: A Systematic Review of Recent Research

Previous research has shown that gambling is a popular activity among adolescents. Following a rapid expansion of legalized gambling opportunities and the emergence of new forms of gambling, many researchers have carried out studies on adolescent gambling and problem gambling. The present paper reviews studies that have been conducted worldwide since 2000, and then presents a more detailed picture of adolescent gambling research in Europe, by providing a country-by country analysis. After an extensive search on academic databases and following an exclusion process, 44 studies were identified. The findings showed that 0.2–12.3 % of youth meet criteria for problem gambling, notwithstanding differences among assessment instruments, cut-offs, and timeframes. However, despite this variability, several demographic characteristics were associated with adolescent gambling involvement and problem gambling. It is concluded that a small but significant minority of adolescents have gambling-related problems. Such findings will hopefully encourage more research into youth gambling to further understand the determinants of this phenomenon.     

Strengthening “Reflective Practice” Within Angolan Civil Society Organizations

This paper reviews the history and capacity development challenges of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Angola. Based on assessments and findings retrieved during the implementation of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) “Support to Civic Education Project,” a capacity development approach will be proposed that facilitates skills development, discovery learning, and self-appropriation of Angolan CSO staff to become effective contributors to economic, human, and social reconstruction.     

Relative Income, Inequality and Subjective Wellbeing: Evidence for Brazil

This paper analyzes the determinants of the self-reported income and food sufficiency in Brazil, highlighting how these subjective measures of wellbeing are affected by relative conditions. Analyses are based on pooled data from the 2002/2003 and 2008/2009 Brazilian Family Budget Survey and on estimates of the multinomial relation between income and food sufficiency with absolute and relative indicators. The paper highlights that living in a more affluent neighborhood does matter in self-reported perceptions of wellbeing. Stated income sufficiency depends positively on absolute family income and negatively on relative neighbor income. Moreover, neighborhood education and regional inequality affect both stated perceptions of income and food sufficiency. The paper concludes that improving personal income and education, as well as reducing inequality, is one of the most effective ways to improve both the quality of life and the general perceptions of wellbeing in society.     

On the Conditional Value-at-Risk probability-dependent utility function

The Expected Shortfall or Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) has been playing the role of main risk measure in the recent years and paving the way for an enormous number of applications in risk management due to its very intuitive form and important coherence properties. This work aims to explore this measure as a probability-dependent utility functional, introducing an alternative view point for its Choquet Expected Utility representation. Within this point of view, its main preference properties will be characterized and its utility representation provided through local utilities with an explicit dependence on the assessed revenue’s distribution (quantile) function. Then, an intuitive interpretation for the related probability dependence and the piecewise form of such utility will be introduced on an investment pricing context, in which a CVaR maximizer agent will behave in a relativistic way based on his previous estimates of the probability function. Finally, such functional will be extended to incorporate a larger range of risk-averse attitudes and its main properties and implications will be illustrated through examples, such as the so-called Allais Paradox.     

Prediction of record values

Given a number of record values from independent and identically distributed random variables with a continuous distribution function F, our aim is to predict future record values under suitable assumptions on the tail of F. In this paper, we are primarily concerned with finding reasonable tolerance regions for future record values. Two methods are proposed. The first one deals with the case where we observe only record values. The second one makes use of the information brought by the complete sample.     

Vector autoregressive models with measurement errors for testing Granger causality

This paper develops a method for estimating the parameters of a vector autoregression (VAR) observed in white noise. The estimation method assumes that the noise variance matrix is known and does not require any iterative process. This study provides consistent estimators and the asymptotic distribution of the parameters required for conducting tests of Granger causality. Methods in the existing statistical literature cannot be used for testing Granger causality, since under the null hypothesis the model becomes unidentifiable. Measurement error effects on parameter estimates were evaluated by using computational simulations. The results suggest that the proposed approach produces empirical false positive rates close to the adopted nominal level (even for small samples) and has a satisfactory performance around the null hypothesis. The applicability and usefulness of the proposed approach are illustrated using a functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset.     

The Higher Up,the more Unequal: On Meritocracy in the Admission to the Brazilian Public Sector

Public Organization Review - This study investigates the admission to positions in the Brazilian public sector based on secondary data. The results of the models tested show that the variables of...     

On the approximability of Time Disjoint Walks

Journal of Combinatorial Optimization - We introduce the combinatorial optimization problem Time Disjoint Walks (TDW), which has applications in collision-free routing of discrete objects (e.g.,...     

Who can lead the revolution?: Re-thinking anticolonial revolutionary consciousness through Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu

Theory and Society - While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria,...