Properly pricing country risk: a model for pricing long-term fundamental risk applied to central and eastern European countries

The private sector has used proxies such as sovereign credit ratings, spreads on sovereign bonds and spreads on sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) to gauge country risk, even though these measures are pricing the risk of default of government bonds, which is different from the risks facing private participants in cross-border financing. Under normal market conditions, the CDS spreads are a very useful source of information on country risk. However, the recent crisis has shown that the CDS spreads might lead to some underpricing or overpricing of fundamentals in the case of excessively low or excessively high risk aversion. In this paper we develop an alternative measure of country risk that extracts the volatile, short-term market sentiment component from the sover eign CDS spread in order to improve its reliability in periods of market distress. We show that adverse market sentiment was a key driver of the sharp increase in sovereign CDS spreads of central and eastern European (CEE) countries during the most severe phase of the crisis. We also show that our measure of country risk sheds some light on the observed stability of cross-border bank flows to CEE banks during the crisis.country risk, credit default swaps, credit ratings, cross-border flows, financial crisis, central and eastern Europe, foreign-owned banks

DE QUE FORMA OS GESTORES PERCEBEM AS CRÍTICAS AO ORÇAMENTO EMPRESARIAL?

O objetivo do estudo é explorar a percepção de gestores de diversas áreas de uma organização de grande porte do setor elétrico brasileiro sobre as críticas ao orçamento tradicional. As críticas abrangem quatro grupos: efeitos perversos sobre os comportamentos dos gestores, inadaptação ao ambiente, ritual e foco excessivo no curto prazo. A pesquisa consiste em um estudo de caso que adota o nível de análise do indivíduo e área, e cujo foco são gestores que participam do processo orçamentário, compondo uma população de 180 gestores. Foram realizadas 9 entrevistas e aplicado um questionário eletrônico em que foi obtida uma amostra de 75 respondentes. Para análise de dados, utilizamos a estatística descritiva, o teste de diferença de médias e a análise do discurso. Os resultados indicam para um baixo nível de críticas ao processo orçamentário, o que converge com os resultados de pesquisas empíricas anteriores desenvolvidas no ambiente nacional e internacional. As críticas com maior concordância no questionário foram o foco excessivo no curto prazo e os efeitos perversos sobre os comportamentos das pessoas. Também identificamos que certas críticas estão associadas à área de formação e à área de atuação do gerente. Através das entrevistas pudemos nos aprofundar na discussão das críticas, por meio dos fragmentos dos discursos dos gestores. Dentre as contribuições destaca-se o olhar para as críticas no contexto profissional e abrangendo as percepções de executivos que não são da área financeira dentro de um único ambiente organizacional. Nesse sentido, propomos que as críticas ao orçamento sejam interpretadas em função do interesse e que as insatisfações sejam tratadas a partir de diferentes perspectivas e ações nas diversas áreas da empresa

Editorial: New professionalism and the future of work: Interdisciplinary perspectives on transformations in business-health relationships

This special issue provides new perspectives into the future of work and it focuses on how innovation, entrepreneurship, and the evolution of digital robotics could influence health and productivity of individuals and enterprises. The world of work is changing rapidly, especially in terms of increasing digitalization and robotic innovation. Such a scenario may represent an opportunity for workers who adapt themselves, but also a potential source of stress and poor well-being for those subjects less inclined to change

Vestibular disability/handicap in Fibromyalgia : a questionnaire study

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a poorly understood, central pain processing disorder characterized by a broad range of symptoms, such as chronic pain, sleep disruption, chronic fatigue, and psychosomatic symptoms. In addition, recent studies have shown that FM patients also experience dizziness. We aimed to establish a prevalence rate of vestibular symptoms in a population of FM patients through a battery of questionnaires investigating socio-demographic, clinical and psychological characteristics, combined with the Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI) and the Situational Vertigo Questionnaire (SVQ). A total of 277 respondents, officially diagnosed with FM, completed the full study, while 80 controls were also included for DHI and SVQ questionnaires. We found that FM participants were significantly affected by vestibular symptoms, which correlated with FM-associated pain and non-pain symptoms. The dizziness reported by FM participants showed peculiar features suggesting an FM-intrinsic mechanism of vestibular dysfunction, possibly linked to migraine and dysautonomia conditions. Correlations between dizziness and depressive mood (or neuroticism), revealed an impact of dizziness on psychological status, leading to depressive reactions and interpersonal difficulties, and possibly involving a noxious, self-sustained stress condition. In conclusion, data showed a manifesting dizziness condition in FM patients that warrants careful clinical attention due to its possible inherent role in the syndrome

Familial aggregation of MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery scores in a large sample of outpatients with schizophrenia and their unaffected relatives

The increased use of the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) to investigate cognitive dysfunctions in schizophrenia fostered interest in its sensitivity in the context of family studies. As various measures of the same cognitive domains may have different power to distinguish between unaffected relatives of patients and controls, the relative sensitivity of MCCB tests for relative-control differences has to be established. We compared MCCB scores of 852 outpatients with schizophrenia (SCZ) with those of 342 unaffected relatives (REL) and a normative Italian sample of 774 healthy subjects (HCS). We examined familial aggregation of cognitive impairment by investigating within-family prediction of MCCB scores based on probands' scores

Performance Assessment in Fingerprinting and Multi Component Quantitative NMR Analyses

An interlaboratory comparison (ILC) was organized with the aim to set up quality control indicators suitable for multicomponent quantitative analysis by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. A total of 36 NMR data sets (corresponding to 1260 NMR spectra) were produced by 30 participants using 34 NMR spectrometers. The calibration line method was chosen for the quantification of a five-component model mixture. Results show that quantitative NMR is a robust quantification tool and that 26 out of 36 data sets resulted in statistically equivalent calibration lines for all considered NMR signals. The performance of each laboratory was assessed by means of a new performance index (named Qp-score) which is related to the difference between the experimental and the consensus values of the slope of the calibration lines. Laboratories endowed with a Qp-score falling within the suitable acceptability range are qualified to produce NMR spectra that can be considered statistically equivalent in terms of relative intensities of the signals. In addition, the specific response of nuclei to the experimental excitation/relaxation conditions was addressed by means of the parameter named NR. NR is related to the difference between the theoretical and the consensus slopes of the calibration lines and is specific for each signal produced by a well-defined set of acquisition parameters

Interplay Among Psychopathologic Variables, Personal Resources, Context-Related Factors, and Real-life Functioning in Individuals With Schizophrenia: A Network Analysis

Enhanced understanding of factors associated with symptomatic and functional recovery is instrumental to designing personalized treatment plans for people with schizophrenia. To date, this is the first study using network analysis to investigate the associations among cognitive, psychopathologic, and psychosocial variables in a large sample of community-dwelling individuals with schizophrenia

The interplay among psychopathology, personal resources, context-related factors and real-life functioning in schizophrenia: stability in relationships after 4 years and differences in network structure between recovered and non-recovered patients

Improving real-life functioning is the main goal of the most advanced integrated treatment programs in people with schizophrenia. The Italian Network for Research on Psychoses previously explored, by using network analysis, the interplay among illness-related variables, personal resources, context-related factors and real-life functioning in a large sample of patients with schizophrenia. The same research network has now completed a 4-year follow-up of the original sample. In the present study, we used network analysis to test whether the pattern of relationships among all variables investigated at baseline was similar at follow-up. In addition, we compared the network structure of patients who were classified as recovered at follow-up versus those who did not recover. Six hundred eighteen subjects recruited at baseline could be assessed in the follow-up study. The network structure did not change significantly from baseline to follow-up, and the overall strength of the connections among variables increased slightly, but not significantly. Functional capacity and everyday life skills had a high betweenness and closeness in the network at follow-up, as they had at baseline, while psychopathological variables remained more peripheral. The network structure and connectivity of non-recovered patients were similar to those observed in the whole sample, but very different from those in recovered subjects, in which we found few connections only. These data strongly suggest that tightly coupled symptoms/dysfunctions tend to maintain each other's activation, contributing to poor outcome in schizophrenia. Early and integrated treatment plans, targeting variables with high centrality, might prevent the emergence of self-reinforcing networks of symptoms and dysfunctions in people with schizophrenia