A Multilevel Multinomial Model for the Dynamics of Graduates Employment in Italy

Social Indicators Research - Several studies have demonstrated that skilled human capital is a key resource for the economic growth of a territory, since it helps to increase productivity,...     

Exploring the drivers of corporate reputation integrated with a corporate responsibility perspective: some reflections in theory and in praxis

Corporate reputation is a multi-stakeholder concept that is reflected in the perceptions that stakeholders have of an organization. There is much evidence that reputation interacts diversely with different stakeholder groups and in relation to other concepts such as corporate responsibility. In this paper, we propose the implementation of the reputational quotient on a sample of Italian SMEs and attempt to discover and measure the relationship with corporate responsibility. Thus concluding that the instruments used for measuring and managing reputation can also be usefully employed in terms of corporate responsibility.     

“She Is Not Acting,She Is”

This essay examines the popular television show RuPaul's Drag Race to reveal the ways drag performance provides an ambivalent, contradictory space for wrestling with contentious issues surrounding cultural identity and authenticity in reality TV. Focusing on the show's controversial season three, the authors demonstrate how drag queens subvert and play with ideas of gender “realness” but find an impasse in open discussions of race. The racial minstrelsy of some contestants we observe created antagonisms between black/brown characters and their white/Asian counterparts, exposing a rift in ideas about racial play despite the general acceptance of flexibility in gender bending. Recognizing that reality TV exploits and uncovers these tensions, we demonstrate that while drag performance enacts a subversive mode of queer performance, it provides a contested site and complex semiotic space for dealing with sensitive matters of race/ethnicity, especially when certain forms of stereotyping are rewarded over others.     

Social Enterprises and Public Value: A Multiple-Case Study Assessment

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Positioned at the crossroads of the market, public policies and civil society, social enterprises are private...     

The relevance of class in shaping authoritarian attitudes: A cross-national perspective

This study provides the first thorough and cross-national assessment of the concept of authoritarianism with regard to the distinction between the working and non-working classes. This pan-European study is the first to demonstrate that, because there are no substantial differences in interpretation between the working class and the non-working class, authoritarianism scores can be compared meaningfully across the two classes. We demonstrate that the working class is more strongly inclined to authoritarianism, as suggested by Lipset. Building further upon this assessment allows a clear picture of the mediating effects of some of Lipset's presumed drivers of this relationship. Although educational levels explain a major part of class differences in authoritarianism, income level, media use and psychological insecurity play a role as well, albeit to a lesser extent. In addition to examining the underlying processes at the individual level, country-level characteristics are studied. Results show that class and authoritarianism are more strongly related to each other in richer countries than they are in relatively poor countries.     

Statistical Modeling of Temporal Dependence in Financial Data via a Copula Function

In financial analysis it is useful to study the dependence between two or more time series as well as the temporal dependence in a univariate time series. This article is concerned with the statistical modeling of the dependence structure in a univariate financial time series using the concept of copula. We treat the series of financial returns as a first order Markov process. The Archimedean two-parameter BB7 copula is adopted to describe the underlying dependence structure between two consecutive returns, while the log-Dagum distribution is employed to model the margins marked by skewness and kurtosis. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the maximum likelihood estimates. Furthermore, we apply the model to the daily returns of four stocks and, finally, we illustrate how its fitting to data can be improved when the dependence between consecutive returns is described through a copula function.     

A comparison of dependence function estimators in multivariate extremes

Various nonparametric and parametric estimators of extremal dependence have been proposed in the literature. Nonparametric methods commonly suffer from the curse of dimensionality and have been mostly implemented in extreme-value studies up to three dimensions, whereas parametric models can tackle higher-dimensional settings. In this paper, we assess, through a vast and systematic simulation study, the performance of classical and recently proposed estimators in multivariate settings. In particular, we first investigate the performance of nonparametric methods and then compare them with classical parametric approaches under symmetric and asymmetric dependence structures within the commonly used logistic family. We also explore two different ways to make nonparametric estimators satisfy the necessary dependence function shape constraints, finding a general improvement in estimator performance either (i) by substituting the estimator with its greatest convex minorant, developing a computational tool to implement this method for dimensions \(D\ge 2\) or (ii) by projecting the estimator onto a subspace of dependence functions satisfying such constraints and taking advantage of Bernstein–Bézier polynomials. Implementing the convex minorant method leads to better estimator performance as the dimensionality increases.