Discriminating From Within

A classic experiment by Henri Tajfel provides evidence for the conclusion that the division of a group into subgroups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior, even if there is no reason for such behavior in terms of the individual's own interest. I don't challenge that conclusion; but I question an implicit assumption which is suggested by the experimental setup and by the language used by Tajfel in describing the experiment. The assumption is that an initially coherent group will typically experience division as a result of outside influence. A totally different picture of the situation and totally different social policy recommendations will follow if we believe instead that groups are evolving structures, and specifically structures that constantly and autonomously come into conflict with themselves.     

Life tables in actuarial models: from the deterministic setting to a Bayesian approach

The mortality dynamics experienced in the latest decades, especially at adult and old ages, has motivated the introduction of major innovations in the modeling of mortality for actuarial applications; such innovations concern, in particular, the representation of the uncertainty relating to aggregate mortality.     

Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants’ ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants’ transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants’ transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual—AV—condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory—VA—condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants’ individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.     

Oil prices and the financial crisis

This paper aims to explain crude oil price volatility and its relationship respect to some macroeconomic and financial variables. Finding the main drivers of oil price dynamics is a crucial element for the definition of adequate monetary policies and risk management purposes. The role of macroeconomic and financial variables is analyzed in a Vector Error Correction Model framework, in order to test the existence of a long run equilibrium in the oil price dynamics. We use monthly data for crude oil prices, the Dollar/Euro exchange rate, the US interest rate, the crude oil Futures open interest, the US oil imports and the gold price over the period 1993–2009. One cointegrating relationship is found which allows to identify a long run equilibrium between the variables.