Income Shifting in Italian Business Groups and some Governance Implications

This paper explores the relationship among group control, financial reporting strategies and governance implications in the pursuit of domestic tax planning. A very large number of papers deals with international tax planning in multidivisional enterprises, but very few are devoted to exploring significant incentives for national business groups to engage in tax planning strategies. In this paper we propose a one-period model relating to the tax incentives of income shifting in Italian business groups. We show that, given the total amount of expected earnings before taxes and the dividends received by the firms belonging to a business group, an optimal solution to the problem of minimizing the group tax burden exists. The optimal solution involves a gain in value for the group as a whole; nevertheless, since in business groups ownership is often differentiated among shareholders (often because of the separation between ownership and control), income shifting may determine wealth transfers, often in favor of the controlling shareholder. We therefore analyze the management and governance implications of such income shifting, for both shareholders and stakeholders (i.e. managers). This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A study of search algorithms’ optimization speed

Search algorithms are often compared by the optimization speed achieved on some sets of cost functions. Here some properties of algorithms’ optimization speed are introduced and discussed. In particular, we show that determining whether a set of cost functions F admits a search algorithm having given optimization speed is an NP-complete problem. Further, we derive an explicit formula to calculate the best achievable optimization speed when F is closed under permutation. Finally, we show that the optimization speed achieved by some well-know optimization techniques can be much worse than the best theoretical value, at least on some sets of optimization benchmarks.     

Monopolistic Competition,Expected Inflation and Contract Length

Abstract. This paper shows that the explicit consideration of the “expected inflation effect” makes it more likely that increases in wage and price flexibility reduce employment variability. This result, obtained in a monopolistic competition model with synchronized contracts, casts doubts on some existing consensus in the literature pointing towards the opposite view. Wage and price flexibility, although ceteris paribus desirable, is however shown to be an inferior substitute for optimally designed demand management.     

Optimal use of two auxiliary variables in double sampling

Double sampling scheme is used when cheap auxiliary variables may be measured to improve the estimation of a finite population parameter. Several estimators for population mean, ratio of means and variance are available, when two dependent samples are drawn. However, there are few proposals for the case of independent samples. In this paper both cases of dependent and independent samples are dealt with. A general approach for estimating a finite population parameter is given, showing that all the proposed estimators are particular cases of the same general class. The minimum variance bound for any estimator in this class is provided (at the first order of approximation). Furthermore, an optimal estimator which reaches this minimum is found.     

克拉多·帕塞拉：领导变革

迄今为止，很少有执行官能够成功地在一家陷入困境的大型组织内部实现变革，克拉多·帕塞拉就是为数不多的成功者之一，不仅如此，他还先后成功地领导两家大型企业完成了变革。     

Estimating a sensitive proportion through randomized response procedures based on auxiliary information

Randomized response techniques are widely employed in surveys dealing with sensitive questions to ensure interviewee anonymity and reduce nonrespondents rates and biased responses. Since Warner’s (J Am Stat Assoc 60:63–69, 1965) pioneering work, many ingenious devices have been suggested to increase respondent’s privacy protection and to better estimate the proportion of people, π _A , bearing a sensitive attribute. In spite of the massive use of auxiliary information in the estimation of non-sensitive parameters, very few attempts have been made to improve randomization strategy performance when auxiliary variables are available. Moving from Zaizai’s (Model Assist Stat Appl 1:125–130, 2006) recent work, in this paper we provide a class of estimators for π _A , for a generic randomization scheme, when the mean of a supplementary non-sensitive variable is known. The minimum attainable variance bound of the class is obtained and the best estimator is also identified. We prove that the best estimator acts as a regression-type estimator which is at least as efficient as the corresponding estimator evaluated without allowing for the auxiliary variable. The general results are then applied to Warner and Simmons’ model.     

A statistical procedure for representing state fragility and transition paths

State fragility is a concept that entered the political discourse in the last decades producing remarkable implications for aid allocation and international policies. The operationalization of this concept has generated a number of composite indices to produce rankings of fragile states. However, the temporal dimension of the driving forces leading to fragility has been rather neglected. This article discusses a statistical procedure that helps to represent the global fragility of a country and the path that a country has followed or will follow in the future when possibly entering into (or escaping from) a fragility condition. Specifically, multiple factor analysis is applied to depict vulnerable and weak countries, and to identify the fundamental forces that determine their overall fragility. Moreover, the trajectories of countries along the years are estimated using partial factor scores. Finally, the path of each country is predicted by means of parsimonious regression models, based on a reduced set of explanatory variables, and according to scenarios elaborated from available international outlooks.     

On cumulative entropies

In analogy with the cumulative residual entropy recently proposed by Wang et al. [2003a. A new and robust information theoretic measure and its application to image alignment. In: Information Processing in Medical Imaging. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2732, Springer, Heidelberg, pp. 388–400; 2003b. Cumulative residual entropy, a new measure of information and its application to image alignment. In: Proceedings on the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’03), vol. 1, IEEE Computer Society Press, Silver Spring, MD, pp. 548–553], we introduce and study the cumulative entropy, which is a new measure of information alternative to the classical differential entropy. We show that the cumulative entropy of a random lifetime X can be expressed as the expectation of its mean inactivity time evaluated at X. Hence, our measure is particularly suitable to describe the information in problems related to ageing properties of reliability theory based on the past and on the inactivity times. Our results include various bounds to the cumulative entropy, its connection to the proportional reversed hazards model, and the study of its dynamic version that is shown to be increasing if the mean inactivity time is increasing. The empirical cumulative entropy is finally proposed to estimate the new information measure.