Is there a regulatory trade-off between stability and performance? Evidence from italian banks.

Disentangling the direct causal effect that sanctions exert on bank performance from the indirect through default risk, we show that a trade-off exists for regulators between banks’ performance and stability in Italy. Two key findings provide evidence for the nontriviality of the return-risk nexus: (i) banks’ liquidations are concentrated at the lower-end of the profitability distribution, resulting in (attrition) biased estimates; (ii) the drop-out is informative since it depends on the unobserved measurements of profitability. Despite this evidence, while returns are affected by sanctions and regulatory requirements, default risk is not. However, looking at growth of gross loans, enforcement actions reduce default risk though at a cost of a significant fall in lending, creating a regulatory tradeoff. In fact, through loans’ growth, we account for the key dynamics of intermediaries’ soundness, namely higher profits and less non-performing loans

An Incentive Theory of Matching

This paper presents a theory explaining the labor market matching process through microeconomic incentives. There are heterogeneous variations in the characteristics of workers and jobs, and firms face adjustment costs in responding to these variations. Matches and separations are described through firms' job offer and firing decisions and workers' job acceptance and quit decisions. This approach obviates the need for a matching function. On this theoretical basis, we argue that the matching function is vulnerable to the Lucas critique. Our calibrated model for the U.S. economy can account for important empirical regularities that the conventional matching model cannot.matching, incentives, adjustment costs, unemployment, employment, quits, firing, job offers, job acceptance

An Empirically Based Model of the Supply Schedule in Day-Ahead Electricity Markets

The first part of this paper establishes some new pieces of evidence on the dynamics of prices and volumes in wholesale electricity day-ahead markets (NordPool, APX, Powernext). The growth of prices is more strongly autocorrelated than the growth of volumes; it is more more heavy-tailed; and its conditional standard deviation decays like the reciprocal of the price level (1/P scaling). In the second part of the paper, it is shown that a linear supply function with stochastic intercept and constant slope suffices to explain the 1/P scaling. Furthermore, this model allows to decompose price fluctuations in an exogenous demand effect and a strategically-driven supply effect. In light of this model, the heavier tails of price growth and its stronger autocorrelation structure are due to persistent and intermittent strategic moves by suppliers, related to expected demand growth.Electricity Markets, Supply Curve, Subbotin Distribution, Fat Tails, Scaling, Demand Effect, Supply Effect.

BUILDING UP LEARNERS’ AUTONOMY AND COOPERATIVE ASSESSMENT

El desarrollo del concepto de autonomía en los estudiantes reviste una granimportancia en la enseñanza de las lenguas actualmente. El presente artículo,recoge la experiencia de siete docentes de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional alimplementar el concepto de autonomía como base de un modelo colaborativo paraguiar y al mismo tiempo evaluar de una manera unificada, el proceso deaprendizaje de la lengua inglesa en los estudiantes en los tres primeros semestresinscritos en los dos programas que ofrece el Departamento de Lenguas.Para la elaboración del Modelo de Aprendizaje Autónomo y EvaluaciónColaborativa, se tuvieron en cuenta diferentes factores que afectan el aprendizajey evaluación de una lengua. En consecuencia, el artículo incluye una descripcióndel perfil de nuestros estudiantes en cuanto a sus estilos de aprendizaje,dominancia cerebral, locus (lugar) de control, cambios en sus actitudes hacia laevaluación y resultados obtenidos en evaluaciones formales. Ademas, seincluyen, de manera general, algunos de los factores que afectan el desempeñodel estudiante en la ejecución de tareas, algunos aspectos que influyen en elaprendizaje de la lengua extranjera, entrenamiento en el uso de estrategias deaprendizaje, co-evaluación y auto-evaluación

Propiedades psicométricas de la validación Española del Cuestionario de Experiencias Depresivas

Introduction: This study assessed the psychometric prop­erties of the Spanish translation of the Depressive Expe­riences Questionnaire (DEQ). This questionnaire measures two different personality dimensions vulnera­ble to two different subtypes of depression, anaclitic de­pression and introjective depression, respectively. Ob­jectives: The aims of this study are to assess the psy­chometric properties of Spanish translation of Depres­sive Experiences Questionnaire and its relationship with at­tachment styles. Method: The sample (N = 416) con­sisted of undergraduate students with a mean of 27.63 (ST = 10.98) years old. The administration was collec­tive and taken under the supervision of the researcher. Results: The results showed good internal consistency, similar to that of other studies. The findings showed sig­nificant re­lationships with other instruments measuring depressive symptomatology and confirmed the hypothe­sis of a rela­tionship between the DEQ and attachment style. Conclu­sion: The Spanish version of the DEQ could be an in­strument for distinguishing the types of personality vul­nerability to different expressions of de­pression in the Spanish population.Introducción: Este estudio evaluó las propiedades psicométricas del Cuestionario de Experiencias Depresi­vas en español, que mide dos dimensiones de la perso­nalidad relacionadas con dos subtipos diferentes de de­presión, depresión anaclítica y depresión introyectiva, respectivamente. Objetivo: Los objetivos de este estudio son comprobar las propiedades psicométricas del instru­mento en población española y su relación con los estilos de apego. Método: La muestra ha sido de 416 personas y está formada por universitarios con una media de 27.63 (DT = 10.98) años de edad. La evaluación fue colectiva y llevada bajo la supervisión del investigador. Resultados: Los resultados han mostrado una buena consistencia in­terna, similar a la de otros estudios, así como relaciones significativas con otros instrumentos de evaluación de sintomatología depresiva y del apego. Conclusiones: La versión española del DEQ pueden ser un instrumento para distinguir los tipos de personalidad vulnerables a las diferentes expresiones de la depresión en la población española.Introduction: This study assessed the psychometric prop­erties of the Spanish translation of the Depressive Expe­riences Questionnaire (DEQ). This questionnaire measures two different personality dimensions vulnera­ble to two different subtypes of depression, anaclitic de­pression and introjective depression, respectively. Ob­jectives: The aims of this study are to assess the psy­chometric properties of Spanish translation of Depres­sive Experiences Questionnaire and its relationship with at­tachment styles. Method: The sample (N = 416) con­sisted of undergraduate students with a mean of 27.63 (ST = 10.98) years old. The administration was collec­tive and taken under the supervision of the researcher. Results: The results showed good internal consistency, similar to that of other studies. The findings showed sig­nificant re­lationships with other instruments measuring depressive symptomatology and confirmed the hypothe­sis of a rela­tionship between the DEQ and attachment style. Conclu­sion: The Spanish version of the DEQ could be an in­strument for distinguishing the types of personality vul­nerability to different expressions of de­pression in the Spanish population

Marketing audit model oriented to the traceability of the objectives and strategies

La auditoría de marketing constituye un primer paso en la planeación del marketing que contribuye al proceso de planeación estratégica y táctica  (Denisa & Jaroslav, 2013) que evalúa el desempeño del marketing; los modelos propuestos son cualitativos, adolecen  de validación empírica y metodología sistemática (Morgan, Clark, & Gooner, 2002), se sustentan en listas de chequeo y preguntas abiertas, generando subjetividad  mediante procesos que no ofrecen claridad sobre la manera de valorar la efectividad y eficiencia de marketing; estos aspectos conllevaron a proponer el desarrollo un modelo de auditoria desde las necesidades que tienen los directivos de marketing en este aspecto. Los resultados de la investigación  permitieron formular un proceso de auditoría sobre las premisas de generar información objetiva y veraz, al igual que verificable, que se estructura en la trazabilidad de los objetivos y estrategias a fin de examinar tanto el proceso de planeación del marketing como el desempeño durante la ejecución del plan. El modelo exhibe los resultados de la auditoría sintetiza información relevantes en una herramienta denominada “marketingrama” que visualiza los principales indicadores relacionando los hechos coyunturales y las decisiones del gerente de marketing en el cumplimiento de los objetivos del área.Marketing Auditing contributes to the strategic and tactical planning process (Denisa & Jaroslav, 2013) used to evaluate its performance; the proposed models are qualitative, they lack of empirical validation and systematic methodology (Morgan, Clark, & Gooner, 2002),these models are based on checklists and opened questions, and they do not offer clarity on how to evaluate marketing effectiveness and efficiency; these aspects led to propose the development of an audit model from the needs of marketing managers. The results allowed to formulate an audit process under the premises of generating objective, truthful as well as verifiable information that is structured in the traceability of the objectives and strategies in order to examine both the marketing planning process and the performance during the execution of the plan. The model shows the results of the audit that synthesizes some relevant information in a tool called marketingram that visualizes the main indicators linking the contextual facts and the decisions of the marketing manager in the goal fulfilment of the are

Towards linked data for Wikidata revisions and Twitter trending hashtags

This paper uses Twitter as a microblogging platform to link hashtags, which relate the message to a topic that is shared among users, to Wikidata, a central knowledge base of information relying on its members and machine bots to keeping its content up to date. The data is stored in a highly structured format, with the added SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language (SPARQL) endpoint to allow users to query its knowledge base. Our research, designs and implements a process to stream live Twitter tweets and to parse existing Wikidata revision XML files provided by Wikidata. Furthermore, we identify if a correlation exists between the top Twitter hashtags and Wikidata revisions over a seventy-seven-day period.We have used statistical evaluation tools, such as ‘Jaccard Ratio’ and ‘Kolmogorov-Smirnov’ to investigate a significant statistical correlation between Twitter hashtags and Wikidata revisions over the studied period

KinMutRF: a random forest classifier of sequence variants in the human protein kinase superfamily

Background: The association between aberrant signal processing by protein kinases and human diseases such as cancer was established long time ago. However, understanding the link between sequence variants in the protein kinase superfamily and the mechanistic complex traits at the molecular level remains challenging: cells tolerate most genomic alterations and only a minor fraction disrupt molecular function sufficiently and drive disease. Results: KinMutRF is a novel random-forest method to automatically identify pathogenic variants in human kinases. Twenty six decision trees implemented as a random forest ponder a battery of features that characterize the variants: a) at the gene level, including membership to a Kinbase group and Gene Ontology terms; b) at the PFAM domain level; and c) at the residue level, the types of amino acids involved, changes in biochemical properties, functional annotations from UniProt, Phospho.ELM and FireDB. KinMutRF identifies disease-associated variants satisfactorily (Acc: 0.88, Prec:0.82, Rec:0.75, F-score:0.78, MCC:0.68) when trained and cross-validated with the 3689 human kinase variants from UniProt that have been annotated as neutral or pathogenic. All unclassified variants were excluded from the training set. Furthermore, KinMutRF is discussed with respect to two independent kinase-specific sets of mutations no included in the training and testing, Kin-Driver (643 variants) and Pon-BTK (1495 variants). Moreover, we provide predictions for the 848 protein kinase variants in UniProt that remained unclassified. A public implementation of KinMutRF, including documentation and examples, is available online (http://kinmut2.bioinfo.cnio.es). The source code for local installation is released under a GPL version 3 license, and can be downloaded from https://github.com/Rbbt-Workflows/KinMut2. Conclusions: KinMutRF is capable of classifying kinase variation with good performance. Predictions by KinMutRF compare favorably in a benchmark with other state-of-the-art methods (i.e. SIFT, Polyphen-2, MutationAssesor, MutationTaster, LRT, CADD, FATHMM, and VEST). Kinase-specific features rank as the most elucidatory in terms of information gain and are likely the improvement in prediction performance. This advocates for the development of family-specific classifiers able to exploit the discriminatory power of features unique to individual protein families

Drivers of corporate bankruptcy and default : study concerning Portuguese Companies

My purpose with this dissertation is to investigate the relevance of financial and economic variables as predictors of corporate bankruptcy (default) in Portugal. Understanding the underlying issues behind corporate distress and failure is crucial for several areas particularly: granting (or not) a bank loan, managing credit risk and pricing debt. The present financial and economic crisis stimulated a growing interest on matters related to corporate default, ratings and scoring models. In this dissertation, I apply, to a sample of medium-large Portuguese companies, updated statistical models for identifying the fundamental variables that lead to bankruptcy (and default), and if they are mainly idiosyncratic and / or systematic, affecting simultaneously all firms. I also fit hazard model for studying hazard rates and survival-time, trying to disclose which variables can shield firms from a hazard event, in this case, bankruptcy. The sample was provided by COFACE, a known credit scoring company and included full annual financial statements, from years 2006 to 2011, adding additional requested information, namely, about bankruptcies and legal actions against firms due to payment default. My findings support the conclusion that some financial and economic variables do influence bankruptcy and default probability together with survival-time, which is perfectly anticipated by corporate finance analysis theory and practice. Nevertheless, I reached some conclusions that contradict others from similar studies