Going concern modifications and related disclosures in the Italian stock market: do regulatory improvements help investors in capturing financial distress?

Journal of Management and Governance - This paper investigates the investor reaction to audit reports containing a going concern modification (GCM) in the Italian market following new amendments...     

Analysis of the spread of Rhynchophorus ferrugineus in an urban area,using GIS techniques: a study case in Central Italy

Urban Ecosystems - The spread of the red palm weevil is now a very severe problem on a global scale. In this paper, we investigate its spread during the 2007–2013 period in a coastal urban...     

Tax differentiation,lobbying, and welfare

To what extent a taxing authority should be granted the power to impose different tax schedules to different groups of taxpayers? Although the policy maker aims at maximizing social welfare, her tax policy may be distorted by the lobbying activity of taxpayers. In this political environment we characterize the conditions under which social welfare can be increased by restricting the set of tax instruments available to the policy maker; i.e., the scope of tax differentiation. We show that full differentiation is more costly, in terms of welfare distortions, when the lobbies are asymmetric in size, while minimal differentiation is more costly when the tax bases are asymmetric across different groups.     

The contribution of non-profit organisations to the management of HIV/AIDS: A comparative study

This article elaborates a typology of organisational responses during the first decade of AIDS/HIV in a dozen Western European countries.Welfare mixes: that is, the division of task between all producers of welfare (both private and public), and the processes at work in these policies, are analysed. Three types are identified, presenting unexpected variants in respect to general typologies of Western welfare states. They underline the importance of non-profit actors and also argue that new forms of co-operation between those actors and public ones can lead to renewed management of the main social issues currently facing Western welfare states.     

The Stock Market Reaction to Investment Decisions: Evidence from Italy

Based on a study of new investment announcements from 1989 to 1995 by Italian firms listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, we find a positive stock price reaction to new investment decisions. The stock price reaction is larger for joint venture announcements. The market response is also larger for non-state owned companies and when the announcement is released in a period of rising stock prices. The announced investment has no impact on the non-voting shares but increases the voting shares' market price through a significant revaluation of their vote-segment. We find some evidence that new investments lead to management's private benefits rather than towards firm value. This is consistent with the typical Italian corporate governance structure, where a majority shareholder safely controls a listed company while having only a fractional claim on the firm's cash flows.     

The 1995 Pension Reform: Equity,Sustainability and Indexation

In financial equilibrium, a pay-as-you-go pension system will offer yields (explicit or implicit) equal to the rate of growth of the incomes subject to the contribution levy or of reasonable proxies such as GDP. One virtue of the contribution-based award formula is that it makes this yield explicit, permitting immediate verification of the system's sustainability. A second virtue is that it ensures equal treatment of all participants. Without prejudicing the constraint of financial sustainability, a pension scheme may choose any one of an infinite number of pairs (combinations) of initial award and indexation rates; or, in other words, any of an infinite set of curves of the total benefit over time. The 1995 pension reform enacted under Lamberto Dini elected zero real indexation, thus permitting higher initial income replacement rates. Insofar as it will generate pension disparities depending on year of retirement, this choice is the likely prelude to creeping real indexation, or recurrent equalizations that will drive the overall yield on contributions above the GDP growth rate and violate the constraint of financial sustainability. Before insoluble problems arise, the reformed system must be amended to decrease income replacement rates to a level compatible with an indexation procedure (be it automatic or discretionary) for adjusting benefits to society's real living standards, as all main pension systems do. The article also criticizes other choices made in the formulation of the law that will prevent the reform from achieving its stated purposes.     

Issues of Stability and Change in Interest Development

Interest development is not an easily studied process. There are at least 4 methods for examining the process of stability and change over time: relative stability, absolute stability, profile stability, and structural stability. A program of research that focuses on examining these 4 types of stability is summarized relative to the issues pertinent to the development of vocational interests in children and adolescents.     

On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism

Understanding the intensification and expansion of extractive industries in contemporary capitalism requires an approach attentive not only to the literal forms of extraction prevalent in mining and agribusiness but also to new fronts of extraction emerging in activities such as data mining and biocapitalism. This article introduces the concept of operations of capital to trace connections between the expansive logic of extraction and capitalist activity in the domains of logistics and finance. Arguing that extractive operations are at large across these domains, we explore their relevance for capital’s relation with its multiple outsides. The resulting analysis provides a basis for mapping struggles against the changing forms of dispossession and exploitation enabled by extraction.     

Cognitive and organizational ergonomics in the transition of the new integrated center of control of an oil refinery: human reliability and administration of changes

The conception of a product is closely tied to its adaptation level to the users. In this view, designers are increasingly oriented to survey the needs and features of the users. This paper aims at developing a diagnosis of employees working in high-complexity activities in a petrochemical company, in light of the physical and operating changes in the Integrated Center of Control; assessing the reception sensibility to changes; assessing the cognitive pattern of the group; and making suggestions that might eliminate or minimize the difficulties in the transition process of the change, in order to reduce the adaptation period. The field of study comprised 111 production, transfer and storage operators, forming 5 groups of desktop activities. The stages of the study followed the following flow: survey of the prescribed tasks and organizational structure; Concentrated Attention test; application of the Work and Disease Risks Inventory (ITRA, Portuguese acronym); and structured psychological interview. The ITRA results pointed to a serious cognitive cost (3.83) for all five groups, this being the largest intervention focus. The items: division of task contents (3.52), social professional relationships (2.93), quality of the physical environment (2.91), physical cost (3.24), emotional cost (2.71), freedom of expression (3.77), professional fulfillment (3.41); experience and suffering (2.75), lack of recognition (2.18) and physical injuries (2.07) were considered critical. Meanwhile, social damages (1.64) and psychological injuries (1.35) are bearable. As to the Concentrated Attention test, most workers registered average level. In the individual interviews, workers showed that larger involvement in the process of physical, organizational and operational change in the desktops and on field works was required, as well as the follow up of implementations, so as to reduce the adaptation process and prevent rework (furniture, equipment, noise, form of communication with the area and training for the changes). As a result of the findings handed to the management and returned to the workers, several actions were implemented on ergonomic non-conformities found in the analysis. It is possible to prove the importance of the insertion of cognitive and organizational ergonomics in the building projects of new facilities for high-complexity activities in petrochemical plants.