Exploring unobserved heterogeneity in perinatal and neonatal mortality risks: The case of an Italian sharecropping community, 1900–39

Previous researchers have found that traditional determinants explain only a limited part of the variation in perinatal and infant mortality at the family level. In the study reported in this paper, we explored the factors that make the perinatal/neonatal death risk more heterogeneous across families. We estimated logistic regressions with cluster random effects at the maternal level, using data from the Italian village of Granarolo from 1900 to 1939. We estimated the effects of selected predictors on perinatal/neonatal mortality and unexplained inter-family variation. We found that non-rural skilled and lower-skilled workers experienced higher perinatal and neonatal mortality risks. Unexplained heterogeneity at the maternal level was lower for women living in sharecropper families than for those in landless labourer and non-rural worker families. Unexplained perinatal and neonatal mortality components were also due to socio-economic differences and were not necessarily related only to maternal biological features or shared genetic frailty.     

Until Further Notice: Post-Modernity and Socio-Territorial Belonging

One of social theory's main concerns is the analysis of the changes that take place in human societies. This article systematizes existing knowledge about the characteristics of post-modern societies by incorporating it into Ferdinand Tönnies’ classical theory of societal change. Post-modern societies are defined as societies in which people are essentially separated, yet still tightly connected in spite of everything that divides them. Tönnies characterizes community as ‘organic’ and society as ‘mechanic’. In this article, contemporary societies are defined as ‘digital’. Their ‘psychological’ foundation, or founding will, is found in the concept of ‘imagination’. New forms of relationships accompany the coming of the digital society. Relationships with other individuals and with the territory are defined as ‘fluid’.     

Maternal singing of lullabies during pregnancy and after birth: Effects on mother–infant bonding and on newborns’ behaviour. Concurrent Cohort Study

Background

Mother–infant bonding is of great importance for the development and the well-being of the baby. The aim of this Concurrent Cohort Study was to investigate the effects of mothers singing lullabies on bonding, newborns’ behaviour and maternal stress.

Testing for Independence of Wage Drift and Minimum Contractual Wage: An Empirical Investigation Using Italian Aggregate Time Series

A theoretical two-stage bargaining model for wage drift and minimum contractual wage is discussed and its implication in terms of Granger-causality between the two variables is tested by using Italian aggregate time series. Empirical evidence suggests rejecting the independence of the two series. This result has, in turn, implications for policy analysis. Our findings seem to indicate the appropriateness of a policy oriented towards decentralized wage setting.     

Partial logistic relevance vector machines in survival analysis

The use of relevance vector machines to flexibly model hazard rate functions is explored. This technique is adapted to survival analysis problems through the partial logistic approach. The method exploits the Bayesian automatic relevance determination procedure to obtain sparse solutions and it incorporates the flexibility of kernel-based models. Example results are presented on literature data from a head-and-neck cancer survival study using Gaussian and spline kernels. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the influence of hyperprior distribution parameters. The proposed method is then contrasted with other flexible hazard regression methods, in particular the HARE model proposed by Kooperberg et al. [16]. A simulation study is conducted to carry out the comparison. The model developed in this paper exhibited good performance in the prediction of hazard rate. The application of this sparse Bayesian technique to a real cancer data set demonstrated that the proposed method can potentially reveal characteristics of the hazards, associated with the dynamics of the studied diseases, which may be missed by existing modeling approaches based on different perspectives on the bias vs. variance balance.     

Local Banks Efficiency and Employment

Abstract. This work analyses the links between credit and labour markets highlighting the influence of credit market inefficiencies on employment. We argue that if banks are not efficient in monitoring the borrowers in the presence of asymmetric information, credit market imperfections have real effects. We estimate dynamic equations using system generalized method of moments (GMM) for bank loans and employment on panel data for Italian firms. The system GMM estimates indicate that the impact of credit market on employment is higher where the local financial market is less developed, asymmetric information is widespread, bank managers are less efficient in assessing the firms' solvency and do not use appropriate methods to evaluate the borrowers' payback capacity.     

Quis custiodet ipsos custodes? How to detect and correct teacher cheating in Italian student data

The increasing diffusion of standardized assessments of students’ competences has been accompanied by an increasing need to make reliable data available to all stakeholders of the educational system (policy makers, teachers, researchers, families and students). In this light, we propose a multistep approach to detect and correct teacher cheating, which decreases the quality of student data offered by the Italian Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training. Our method integrates the “mechanistic” logic of the fuzzy clustering technique with a statistical model-based approach, and it aims to improve the detection of cheating and to correct test scores at both the class and student level. The results show a normalization of the scores and a stronger correction on data for Southern regions, where the propensity to cheat appears to be highest.