Physical exercise,nutrition and hormones: three pillars to fight sarcopenia

Background: Sarcopenia is a pathophysiological condition diffused in elderly people; it represents a social issue due to the longer life expectancy and the growing aging population. It affects negatively quality of life and it represents a risk factor for other pathologies, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. No silver bullet exists to hinder sarcopenia, but it may be counteracted by physical exercise, nutrition, and a proper endocrine milieu. Indeed, we aim to analyze the scientific literature to give to clinician effective advices to counteract sarcopenia.

Main text: Physical exercise, proper nutrition, optimized hormonal homeostasis represent the three pillars to fight sarcopenia. Physical exercise represents the most effective remedy to face sarcopenia, in particular if it is combined with a proper diet and with an adequate endocrine milieu. Consistency in training, adequate daily protein intake and eugonadism seems to be the keys to fight sarcopenia. The combination of these three pillars might act synergistically.

Conclusions: Optimization of these factors may increase their efficiency; however, scientific data may be sometimes confusing so far. Therefore, we aim to give practical advices to clinician to identify and to highlight the most important aspects in each of these three factors that should be addressed.     

SPECULATIVE PROFITS,INNOVATION, AND GROWTH

When technological change affects the prices of tradeable assets, innovators can obtain speculative profits by exploiting their inside information as to the occurrence of innovations. We propose a tractable model of endogenous growth that formalizes this argument, originally due to Hirshleifer (1971). We then use the model to assess two claims advanced by Hirshleifer, namely, that speculative profits can generate excessive investment in R&D when they add to monopoly rents guaranteed by patent protection, or else even in a perfectly competitive economy. The analysis confirms the first claim, but casts doubts on the second one. (JEL O30, O40)     

Performance management change in archaeological sites: The case of Herculaneum Conservation Project

This study focuses on the issues relating to the implementation of management accounting systems in complex settings such as archeological sites. The aim is to understand the conditions under which the implementation of performance management systems (PMS) may enable cultural organizations to fulfil their multiple objectives and the factors which play a crucial role in such dynamics. Focusing on the Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP) the study explains how PMS came to be implemented having been made acceptable to all parties involved. The Middle Range Theory as developed by Broadbent and Laughlin (Accounting control and controlling accounting: interdisciplinary and critical perspectives, Bingley, Emerald, 2013) was utilized to explore how the PMS change took place in the HCP, and focus on the factors influencing this process. The findings reveal that the change in the PMS benefited from the involvement of a multidisciplinary Specialist Work Group. This involvement reduced the natural tendency to resist the forces of change and increased the commitment of the various groups of stakeholders to the new culture. The findings reveal how PMS were developed in the context of a multifaceted approach to change, allowing us to draw both theoretical and practical lessons that may be brought to bear in other complex contexts.     

Community-Based Determinants of Community Engagement: A Meta-Analysis Research

In literature, several variables, both individual and collective level, have been utilized to explain community engagement: the active, voluntary involvement of individuals and groups in changing problematic conditions in communities. The purpose of this study is to identify the main community-based variables and, via meta-analysis research, calculate the effects of these variables on community engagement. These variables include sense of community, community identity, social well-being, place identity, trust in the community, trust in institutions, and community cohesion. The overall and partial effect sizes and heterogeneity between studies were calculated. Some study characteristics (i.e. type of sample, size of sample, percentage of women in the sample, and mean age) were used as moderators for subsample analysis and meta-regressions. The first six major variables (sense of community, community identity, social well-being, place identity, trust in the community, and trust in institutions) show a positive but moderate relationship with community engagement. As for the moderating variables were not found substantial variations. The data are very heterogeneous and highlight the complex and multivariate nature of community engagement. Theoretical and methodological implications were discussed.     

Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia

Despite recent strong interest in the link between fertility and subjective well-being, the focus has centered on developed countries. For poorer countries, in contrast, the relationship remains rather elusive. Using a well-established panel survey—the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS)—we investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa. Consistent with the fertility theories for developing countries and with the sociodemographic characteristics of rural Ethiopia, we hypothesize that this relationship varies by gender and across life stages, being more positive for men and for parents in old age. Indeed, our results suggest that older men benefit the most in terms of life satisfaction from having a large number of children, while the recent birth of a child is detrimental for the subjective well-being of women at reproductive ages. We address endogeneity issues by using lagged life satisfaction in ordinary least squares regressions, through fixed-effects estimation and the use of instrumental variables.     

Agency costs of free cash flow,internal capital markets and unrelated diversification

This paper investigates whether free cash flow arguments or the internal capital market perspective better explains diversification decisions. Based on a unique panel of hand-collected data from listed and unlisted Italian firms for the 1980–2010 time period, the results of this study generally reveal the predominant role of the internal capital market arguments. The benefits of unrelated diversification, which include the avoidance of costly external financing, outweigh its costs, which involve opportunistic problems. Although the literature suggests two distinct forces concurrently affect diversification decisions, in the Italian context, financial benefits appear to be the prevailing motivation for unrelated diversification decisions. Furthermore, the internal capital market argument has a strong effect on decisions to engage in unrelated diversification, particularly with respect to firms that are sensitive to financial constraints.     

Anti-austerity between militant materialism and real democracy: exploring pragmatic prefigurativism

ABSTRACT

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the ‘age of austerity’ that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as ‘pragmatic prefigurativism’. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a ‘left convergence’ of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility.     

Spatial Risk Analysis of Power Systems Resilience During Extreme Events

The increased frequency of extreme events in recent years highlights the emerging need for the development of methods that could contribute to the mitigation of the impact of such events on critical infrastructures, as well as boost their resilience against them. This article proposes an online spatial risk analysis capable of providing an indication of the evolving risk of power systems regions subject to extreme events. A Severity Risk Index (SRI) with the support of real‐time monitoring assesses the impact of the extreme events on the power system resilience, with application to the effect of windstorms on transmission networks. The index considers the spatial and temporal evolution of the extreme event, system operating conditions, and the degraded system performance during the event. SRI is based on probabilistic risk by condensing the probability and impact of possible failure scenarios while the event is spatially moving across a power system. Due to the large number of possible failures during an extreme event, a scenario generation and reduction algorithm is applied in order to reduce the computation time. SRI provides the operator with a probabilistic assessment that could lead to effective resilience‐based decisions for risk mitigation. The IEEE 24‐bus Reliability Test System has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed online risk analysis, which was embedded in a sequential Monte Carlo simulation for capturing the spatiotemporal effects of extreme events and evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method.