Personal psychological resources,resilience and self-efficacy and their relationship with psychological distress in situations of unemployment / Los recursos psicológicos personales,resiliencia y autoeficacia,y su relación con el malestar psicológico en situaciones de desempleo

According to Hobfoll’s conservation of resources theory (1989), psychological resources such as resilience and self-efficacy could mediate the effects of unemployment on well-being. The objective of this study is to analyse the mediating role of self-efficacy and resilience on the relationship between the amount of time unemployed and psychological distress. A sample of unemployed persons from the Region of Murcia was used (N = 280). With a transversal design and using the macro PROCESS for SPSS (2013), a multiple mediation model is proposed which analyses the mediating role of psychological resources in relation to the amount of time unemployed and self-perceived health. The explained variance of this model is 23.79%. The results show that only self-efficacy partially mediates in the relationship between the two variables (β = .18, SD = 0.06, p < .01). The main contribution of this article is showing that personal psychological resources are an effective tool to cope with life stressors, such as, in this case, unemployment.     

Relational Interactions Between Immigrant and Native-Born Volunteers: Trust-Building and Integration or Suspicion and Conflict?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - We investigate the bridging interactions between migrant-background and native-born volunteers. Bridging interactions are...     

Importance of fairness in humanitarian relief distribution

Abstract

This article is inspired by some of the challenges faced by non-governmental organizations in the distribution of humanitarian relief to vulnerable rural communities. A major concern of these organizations is to warrant that relief is distributed in an impartial and transparent way, which gives rise to the notion of fairness. This article thus discusses the importance of fairness in relief distribution and how it can be defined, especially in a context where delivery of vital items must be ensured periodically. We also propose some performance indicators to measure fairness, which can be useful to organizations that are held accountable for the impartiality of their decisions. Finally, an empirical study of an academic case, inspired by a rural aid distribution problem, is used to analyse how different mathematical formulations may contribute in helping crisis managers integrate fairness or equity in their decisions.     

Measuring Human Development: A Multi-criteria Approach

In 2010 the Human Development Index (HDI) was revised with several major changes. Many of its problems were tackled, although some drawbacks still persist. This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach to measure human development, propounding two innovations for the computation of the HDI: (1) the introduction of a double reference point scheme in the normalization; (2) an aggregation function which deals with the problem of substitutability between components. In particular, for each component of the HDI the value of each country is normalized by means of two reference values (aspiration and reservation values) by using an achievement scalarizing function that is piecewise linear. Aggregating the new normalized values, we calculate a range of indices with different degrees of substitutability: (1) a weak index that allows total substitutability; (2) a strong index that measures the state of the worst component and allows no substitutability; and (3) a mixed index that is a combination of the first two.     

Characterizations through reliability measures from weighted distributions

In this paper we obtain general characterizations of probability distributions from relationships between failure rate and mean residual life from the origin distribution and associated weighted distribution. Our characterization properties extend particular results given by Gupta and Keating (1986), Jain et al. (1989) and Asadi (1998). Using the theoretical results we obtain characterizations of some usual distributions. Received: December 7, 1998; revised version: May 10, 2000     

Kernel density estimation using weighted data ∗

In this paper we compare the kernel density estimators proposed by Bhattacharyya et al. (1988) and Jones (1991) for length biased data, showing the asymptotic normality of the estimators. A method to construct a new estimator is proposed. Moreover, we extend these results to weighted data and we study an estimator for the weight function.     

Robust bootstrap densities for dynamic conditional correlations: implications for portfolio selection and Value-at-Risk

ABSTRACT

Many financial decisions such as portfolio allocation, risk management, option pricing and hedge strategies are based on the forecast of the conditional variances, covariances and correlations of financial returns. Although the decisions depend on the forecasts covariance matrix little is known about effects of outliers on the uncertainty associated with these forecasts. In this paper we analyse these effects on the context of dynamic conditional correlation models when the uncertainty is measured using bootstrap methods. We also propose a bootstrap procedure to obtain forecast densities for return, volatilities, conditional correlation and Value-at-Risk that is robust to outliers. The results are illustrated with simulated and real data.