Moment Independent Importance Measures: New Results and Analytical Test Cases

Moment independent methods for the sensitivity analysis of model output are attracting growing attention among both academics and practitioners. However, the lack of benchmarks against which to compare numerical strategies forces one to rely on ad hoc experiments in estimating the sensitivity measures. This article introduces a methodology that allows one to obtain moment independent sensitivity measures analytically. We illustrate the procedure by implementing four test cases with different model structures and model input distributions. Numerical experiments are performed at increasing sample size to check convergence of the sensitivity estimates to the analytical values.     

Board compensation and ownership structure: empirical evidence for Italian listed companies

This paper investigates the relationships among corporate ownership, the level of board compensation, and firms’ future performance within Italian listed companies. Board compensation could be related to corporate ownership characteristics, like the type of controlling shareholder, ownership concentration, the separation between cash flow and voting rights, and the presence of shareholders’ agreements. The evidence of high levels of board compensation associated with certain governance characteristics could signal, in a principal-agent framework, rent extraction by entrenched managers or by controlling shareholders versus minority shareholders; high board compensation, however, could be related to the need to hire directors with higher professional standing and also to the desire to create a network with other companies through the enlargement of the board, according to a social network view. In this paper we disentangle this issue showing the relationship between excess board compensation and future performance: examining firms listed on the Milan Stock Exchange over the period 1995–2002, we show that board compensation is linked to many governance characteristics, but excess compensation is never positively related to future performance. For founder family firms, in particular, high board compensation is associated with (a) smaller board size; (b) higher proportion of family members on the board; (c) lower future performance. The whole evidence therefore doesn’t support the hypothesis suggested by the social network view, but is consistent with a rent extraction hypothesis. These results could add new empirical evidence to the recent debate on the need for global remuneration reform. According to our results, some control mechanism and an increase in transparency of executive compensation schemes could be appropriate.     

When did coronavirus arrive in Europe?

Statistical Methods & Applications - The first cluster of coronavirus cases in Europe was officially detected on 21st February 2020 in Northern Italy, even if recent evidence showed sporadic...     

Socioeconomic Status,Income Inequality,and Health Complaints: A Basic Psychological Needs Perspective

Socioeconomic status (SES) and income inequality are now recognized as important determinants of health, and there is growing interest in uncovering the intermediary psychosocial pathways through which the socioeconomic context affects physical well-being (Marmot in The status syndrome: how social standing affects our health and longevity, Henry Holt, New York, 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, Allen Lane, London, 2009). We adopted the applied framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci and Ryan in Psychol Inq 11:227–268, 2000) and hypothesized that fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness would mediate the relationships that SES and income inequality have to self-rated health. An online community sample of American participants (N = 1,139) completed a detailed demographic survey and provided self-reports of need fulfillment and health complaints. Structural equation models controlled for impression management and self-deceptive enhancement. Controlling for sex and age, need fulfillment was predicted positively by subjective SES and objective household income and negatively by state-level income inequality; in turn, need fulfillment predicted lower levels of health complaints. These findings suggest that SDT provides a useful framework for the study of SES, income inequality, and health, and that basic psychological needs are an important mechanism through which socioeconomic contexts influence health.     

Belief‐Free Equilibria in Games With Incomplete Information

We define belief‐free equilibria in two‐player games with incomplete information as sequential equilibria for which players' continuation strategies are best replies after every history, independently of their beliefs about the state of nature. We characterize a set of payoffs that includes all belief‐free equilibrium payoffs. Conversely, any payoff in the interior of this set is a belief‐free equilibrium payoff. The characterization is applied to the analysis of reputations.     

Power and inequality in global value chains: Advancing the research agenda

Power is a central, but largely undertheorized, concept for scholars of global value chains (GVCs). In this introduction to a special issue on power and inequality in GVCs, the authors summarize the key insights from the articles gathered here and explain how the collection advances our understanding of the types and forms of power operating in GVCs and their effect on different dimensions of inequality.     

On two conjectures about perturbations of the stochastic growth rate

The stochastic growth rate describes long-run growth of a population that lives in a fluctuating environment. Perturbation analysis of the stochastic growth rate provides crucial information for population managers, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. This analysis quantifies the response of the stochastic growth rate to changes in demographic parameters. A form of this analysis deals with changes that only occur in some environmental states. Caswell put forth two conjectures about environment-specific perturbations of the stochastic growth rate. The conjectures link the stationary distribution of the stochastic environmental process with the magnitude of some environment-specific perturbations. This note disproves one conjecture and proves the other.