The Impact of Corporate Governance on Risk Taking in European Insurance Industry

The aim of this paper is to develop an empirical research on the nature and consequences of corporate governance on Eurozone Insurance Industry risk taking attitude. More particularly, we analyzed the effect of public ownership on risk taking with respect to privately held Insurance Companies. We also analyzed the effects on risk taking attitude of different degrees of ownership concentration, directors compensation, and the dimension/diversity of the Board of Directors. Our results provide quite strong evidence that, coherently with the Agency Theory, publicly traded insurance companies with more concentrated ownership are less risky than the corresponding privately held

Thermo magnetic {FEM} simulation of a {PM} synchronous motor with input data from telemetry driving cycles

Abstract Nowadays, the requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to provide a healthy and more habitable environment, has led to the development of several sustainable alternative for eco-mobility. Since the improvement of internal combustion engine has reached a steady state point in terms of overall efficiency, the increasingly stringent requirements imposed by international normative standards are leading automotive companies to find other alternatives to reduce pollution. Thanks to the exponentially growth of power electronics, the huge interest on research of high energy and power density batteries and the more integration of the embedded systems, the central role of the electric drive has taken over on most of vehicles applications. The wide use of permanent magnets synchronous motors for electric vehicles application has rapidly spread out, thanks to their capability to provide high torque and efficiency with low weight and size. Since the natural behaviour of permanent magnets to demagnetize under severe conditions, both coupled thermal and magnetics, the necessity to understand and predict the phenomena is mandatory. This paper carries out a performance analysis in duty cycle, given by real CAN and GPS readings in a studied pathway, with discussion of numerical and graphic technical evaluations. Finite element software has also been used for coupled electromagnetic and thermal calculation to set the magnets working point and establish the temperature distribution within the motor itself during the whole thermal transient. A particular overview is done on the dependence of material used and different cooling solutions adopted

Deep, multiband photometry of low-mass stars to reveal young clusters: A blind study of the NGC2264 region

Context. Thanks to their extensive and homogeneous sky coverage, deep, large-scale, multiwavelength surveys are uniquely suited to statistically identify and map young star clusters in our Galaxy. Such studies are crucial to address issues like the initial mass function, or the modes and dynamics of star cluster formation and evolution. Aims: We aim to test a purely photometric approach to statistically identify a young clustered population embedded in a large population of field stars, with no prior knowledge of the nature of stars in the field. We conducted our blind test study on the NGC 2264 region, which hosts a well-known, richly populated young cluster (∼3 Myr-old) and several active star-forming sites. Methods: We selected a large (4 deg2) area around the NGC 2264 cluster, and assembled an extensive r, i, J catalog of the field from pre-existing large-scale surveys, notably Pan-STARRS1 and UKIDSS. We then mapped the stellar color locus on the (i - J, r - i) diagram to select M-type stars, which offer the following observational advantages with respect to more massive stars: (i) they comprise a significant fraction of the Galactic stellar population; (ii) their pre-main sequence phase lasts significantly longer than for higher mass stars; (iii) they exhibit the strongest luminosity evolution from the pre-main sequence to the main sequence; (iv) their observed r, i, J colors provide a direct and empirical estimate of AV. A comparative analysis of the photometric and spatial properties of M-type stars as a function of AV enabled us to probe the structure and stellar content of our field. Results: Using only r, i, J photometry, we could identify two distinct populations in our field: a diffuse field population and a clustered population in the center of the field. The presence of a concentration of occulting material, spatially associated with the clustered population, allowed us to derive an estimate of its distance (800-900 pc) and age (∼0.5-5 Myr); these values are overall consistent with the literature parameters for the NGC 2264 star-forming region. The extracted clustered population exhibits a hierarchical structure, with two main clumps and peaks in number density of objects around the most reddened locations within the field. An excellent agreement is found between the observed substructures for the clustered population and a map of the NGC 2264 subregions reported in the literature. Our selection of clustered members is coherent with the literature census of the NGC 2264 cluster for about 95% of the objects located in the inner regions of the field, where the estimated contamination rate by field stars in our sample is only 2%. In addition, the availability of a uniform dataset for a large area around the NGC 2264 region enabled us to discover a population of about a hundred stars with indications of statistical membership to the cluster, therefore extending the low-mass population census of NGC 2264 to distances of 10-15 pc from the cluster cores. Conclusions: By making use solely of deep, multiband (r, i, J) photometry, without assuming any further knowledge of the stellar population of our field, we were able to statistically identify and reconstruct the structure of a very young cluster that has been a prime target for star formation studies over several decades. The method tested here can be readily applied to surveys such as Pan-STARRS and the future LSST to undertake a first complete census of low-mass, young stellar populations down to distances of several kiloparsecs across the Galactic plane. Full Table 4 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/621/A1

Diagnostic SARS-CoV-2 Cycle Threshold Value Predicts Disease Severity, Survival, and Six-Month Sequelae in COVID-19 Symptomatic Patients

To date, there is no severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2-(SARS-CoV-2)-specific prognostic biomarker available. We assessed whether SARS-CoV-2 cycle threshold (Ct) value at diagnosis could predict novel CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity, clinical manifestations, and six-month sequelae. Hospitalized and outpatient cases were randomly sampled from the diagnoses of March 2020 and data collected at 6 months by interview and from the regional database for COVID-19 emergency. Patients were stratified according to their RNA-dependent-RNA-polymerase Ct in the nasopharyngeal swab at diagnosis as follows: Group A ≤ 20.0, 20.0 < group B ≤ 28.0, and Group C > 28.0. Disease severity was classified according to a composite scale evaluating hospital admission, worst oxygen support required, and survival. Two hundred patients were included, 27.5% in Groups A and B both, 45.0% in Group C; 90% of patients were symptomatic and 63.7% were hospitalized. The median time from COVID-19 onset to swab collection was five days. Lethality, disease severity, type, and number of signs and symptoms, as well as six-month sequelae distributed inversely among the groups with respect to SARS-CoV-2 Ct. After controlling for confounding, SARS-CoV-2 Ct at diagnosis was still associated with COVID-19-related death (p = 0.023), disease severity (p = 0.023), number of signs and symptoms (p < 0.01), and presence of six-month sequelae (p < 0.01). Early quantification of SARS-CoV-2 may be a useful predictive marker to inform differential strategies of clinical management and resource allocation

Universal sub-leading terms in ground state fidelity

The study of the (logarithm of the) {\em fidelity} i.e., of the overlap amplitude, between ground states of Hamiltonians corresponding to different coupling constants, provides a valuable insight on critical phenomena. When the parameters are infinitesimally close, it is known that the leading term behaves as $O(L^\alpha)$ ($L$ system size) where $\alpha$ is equal to the spatial dimension $d$ for gapped systems, and otherwise depends on the critical exponents. Here we show that when parameters are changed along a critical manifold, a sub-leading O(1) term can appear. This term, somewhat similar to the topological entanglement entropy, depends only on the system's universality class and encodes non-trivial information about the topology of the system. We relate it to universal $g$ factors and partition functions of (boundary) conformal field theory in $d=1$ and $d=2$ dimensions. Numerical checks are presented on the simple example of the XXZ chain.Comment: revtex4, 2 pdf figure