Alcune considerazioni sul Fondo Trattamento di Fine Rapporto, come fondo a prestazione definita, nello IAS 19

Nel lavoro si esamina l\u2019applicazione dello IAS 19 all\u2019Istituto del TFR (Trattamento di Fine Rapporto), tipico della legislazione italiana. In varie sedi (nazionali e internazionali) \ue8 stato messo in discussione l\u2019applicabilit\ue0 del Metodo PUCM (Projected Unit Credit Method) all\u2019Istituto del TFR in quanto non sembrava chiaro quale parte (Impresa o Lavoratore) si facesse carico del rischio attuariale dell\u2019Obbligazione. Nel lavoro, utilizzando la Matematica Attuariale necessaria alle valutazioni dei Fondi a Prestazione Definita, si ricava inconfutabilmente che il Fondo TFR calcolato secondo i principi contabili dello IAS 19 \ue8 una sorta di Riserva Matematica che esprime, quanto, in base alle informazioni disponibili alla data di Bilancio, in base alle ipotesi che, sempre a tale data, \ue8 ragionevole porre a base delle valutazioni, \ue8 opportuno appostare. Ci\uf2 permette di affermare che proprio le tecniche attuariali danno affidabilit\ue0 alle valutazioni in modo da giustificare il riconoscimento delle passivit\ue0 cos\uec valutate

The interest cost calculation under IAS 19 when discounting with a yield curve

Some concerns have been raised in recent discussions on how to calculate the interest cost when measuring the defined benefit obligation (DBO) using a yield curve. This article presents the application of some noted concepts on the yield curve in reference to IAS 19.The issue we investigate specifically concerns the rate or rates to be used when discounting expected liabilities (DBO calculation) and the resulting interest cost (IC) calculation criteria. We analyze three different approaches that are commonly used in actuarial practice.These different methods do not produce significant effects on the amount of DBO, while they lead to annual IC values (and consequently actuarial gains/losses) that may be significantly different in relation to the performance of the yield curve.In this paper, after having reviewed the basic concepts of using a yield curve to evaluate a liability, these concepts are applied to a tangible example in order to quantify the differences that occur in the use of the three approaches. We then show that only the first approach has the characteristics of a model consistent with the assumptions underlying the construction of the model itself.</jats:p

Biological mechanisms linked to inflammation in cancer: Discovery of tumor microenvironment-related biomarkers and their clinical application in solid tumors:

Our view of cancer biology radically shifted from a "cancer-cell-centric" vision to a view of cancer as an organ disease. The concept that genetic and/or epigenetic alterations, at the basis of cancerogenesis, are the main if not the exclusive drivers of cancer development and the principal targets of therapy, has now evolved to include the tumor microenvironment in which tumor cells can grow, proliferate, survive, and metastasize only within a favorable environment. The interplay between cancer cells and the non-cellular and cellular components of the tumor microenvironment plays a fundamental role in tumor development and evolution both at the primary site and at the level of metastasis. The shape of the tumor cells and tumor mass is the resultant of several contrasting forces either pro-tumoral or anti-tumoral which have at the level of the tumor microenvironment their battle field. This crucial role of tumor microenvironment composition in cancer progression also dictates whether immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitor antibodies is going to be efficacious. Hence, tumor microenvironment deconvolution has become of great relevance in order to identify biomarkers predictive of efficacy of immunotherapy. In this short paper we will briefly review the relationship between inflammation and cancer, and will summarize in 10 short points the key concepts learned so far and the open challenges to be solved

A model-driven approach to better identify older people at risk of depression

Depression in later life is one of the most common mental disorders. Several instruments have been developed to detect the presence or the absence of certain symptoms or emotional disorders, based on cut-off points. However, the use of a cut-off does not allow identification of depression sub-types or distinguish between mild and severe depression. As a result, depression may be under- or over-diagnosed in older people. This paper aims to apply a model-driven approach to classify individuals into distinct sub-groups, based on different combinations of depressive and emotional conditions. This approach is based on two distinct statistical solutions: first, a latent class analysis is applied to the items collected by the depression scale and, according to the final model, the probability of belonging to each class is calculated for every individual. Second, a factor analysis of these classes is performed to obtain a reduced number of clusters for easy interpretation. We use data collected through the EURO-D scale in a large sample of older individuals, participants of the sixth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We show that by using such a model-based approach it is possible to classify individuals in a more accurate way than the simple dichotomisation ‘depressed’ versus ‘non-depressed’

Occupational allergy to horse allergens: More than exposure to horses!

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A Stochastic Model to Evaluate Pricing Distortions in Indemnity Insurance Methods for MTPL Insurance

Direct compensation or the direct reimbursement scheme is an indemnity insurance method that many European and American countries use to manage motor liability claims in which the driver that suffers an accident is paid by his/her insurance company that possibly later receives a flat-rate reimbursement (known as forfeit). Using non-life actuarial methodologies, this article analyses the distortion effects due to the direct compensation mechanisms and the effects of different forfeit reimbursement systems on policyholder tariffs in the management of motor liability claims involving vehicles in two different sectors, i.e. automobile and motorcycle. We empirically analyse and formalize the distortion effects resulting from the mechanism that different direct reimbursement systems produce, and explore the correlation between increasing tariffs for motorcycle policyholders and decreasing tariffs for other vehicle policyholders. We propose some alternative methods to overcome these distortion effects, evaluating their pricing impact through a stochastic model applied to a case study

Wandering through Guilt. Cain’s Archetype in the Twentieth-Century Novel (1940-1960)

2009 - 2010“The literary fortune of the Cain-Abel couple seems to prove that the divine mark has worked”. It is around this quotation by Cécile Hussherr that my thesis revolves; that is, how a story that in the original text is just a few pages long – although we are talking about that Text, the Bible – has been able to give origin not only to a tradition, but also to a real literary myth whose germination in Western literatures is almost endless. However, what is particularly urgent in this study is to demonstrate how this myth did not originate from biblical sources, or rather, not only; but how it is actually just one of the most influent forms taken by what is, in my opinion, a virtually universal archetype. This research aims, therefore, to go beyond the “explicit” rewriting of the myth of Cain; I aspire instead to uncover the myth where it has penetrated more or less secretly and consciously. In my opinion, Cain’s story can be considered, together with that of Ulysses or Faust, a kind of monomyth. It is this consideration that moves the predilection for the archetypal criticism, as it was principally theorized by Northrop Frye in the second half of the last century. As it is rooted in psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, this method can be considered “middle distanced” – not exclusively structured on close reading nor on a socio-historical or psychoanalytical analysis, but using all these instruments in concert. This dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to the definition of the fundamental characteristics of the paradigm I am analysing, guilt and wandering, from a socio-historical, religious, and psychoanalytical point of view. In the second part the examination of the texts under review begins; they are all novels written between 1940 and 1960. Here I take into consideration two English works of the ’40s, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), both characterized by the incarnation in the two protagonists of historical but also universal guilt; both of them are drunken outcasts, burdened by a sense of guilt and metaphysical and existential uncertainty, and they are destined to death. The third and last part is centred instead on novels written in the two countries which are perhaps the most “marked” by the Second World War: the German Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome, 1954) by Wolfgang Koeppen, and Nobi (Fires on the Plain, 1951), a novel by the Japanese Ōoka Shōhei. In these works the paradox that can arise between guilt and sense of guilt is brought to its extreme manifestations, as it is between history and personal experience. [edited by author]IX n.s

Exultemur et laetemur. Riscritture inglesi e angloamericane della storia di Cristo

The novel genre has explored – with its peculiar possibilities – the dynamic changes, in significance and expectations, that the figure of Christ, a “character” strictly codified in the Gospels,  has inspired again and again in different contexts. The starting point is the examination of constants and variants in the representation of Christ in the discourse developed in the period that stretches from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the end of the last century (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago) – rewritings that have reinterpreted historical and religious facts in order to transform them into something else: epitome, metaphor, objective correlative, scapegoat.The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of British and Anglo-American literary texts and films of the last decades which have used irony or explicit laughter as instruments for retelling in heterodox – but only apparently blasphemous – ways the life of Jesus, between canonical and apocryphal Gospels, making it new material, euphoric and vital hypostasis. This was possible only after the appearance of Nietzsche’s antichrist, after the figure of Christ had become, in the nineteenth century, Hegelian (Strauss), proto-communist (Sauriac and Lynn Linton) and positivist (Renan). In particular, two texts will be analyzed: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), by Christopher Moore, and The Second Coming (2011) by John Niven, and also classic films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and Dogma (1999), directed by Kevin Smith. In these works of the twenty-first century, Christ is still a character who has to fulfil his destiny, in one way or another; these texts represent real theological fictions, complex constructions that want to draw, in an effective way, a reassuring road to salvation, a customised paradise.Il genere romanzo ha potuto esplorare, con le sue possibilità specifiche, i dinamici spostamenti di senso e le aspettative che la figura di Cristo, un “personaggio” strettamente codificato dai Vangeli, ha di volta in volta ispirato in contesti diversi. Il punto di partenza è l’esame di costanti e varianti nella rappresentazione della figura di Gesù nel discorso sviluppatosi in un arco di tempo che va dagli ultimi decenni dell’Ottocento sino alla fine del secolo scorso (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago), riscritture che hanno reinterpretato i dati storici e religiosi per trasformarli in qualcos’altro: epitome, metafora, correlativo oggettivo, capro espiatorio.L’intento è qui quello di prendere in esame alcuni testi letterari e film anglo-americani degli ultimi decenni, che hanno fatto dell’ironia o dell’esplicito riso gli strumenti per riscrivere in maniera eterodossa, ma solo apparentemente blasfema, la vita di Gesù, tra Vangeli canonici e apocrifi, rendendola materia nuova, ipostasi euforica e vitale, dopo l’anticristo nietzschiano, dopo che la sua figura è diventata, nell’Ottocento, hegeliana (Strauss), proto-comunista (Sauriac e Lynn Linton), positivista (Renan). In particolare, si prenderanno in esame i due romanzi The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), di Christopher Moore, e The Second Coming (2011) di John Niven, e si farà riferimento ai classici del cinema di genere, Life of Brian (1979) dei Monty Python, e Dogma (1999), diretto da Kevin Smith. In queste opere degli anni duemila Cristo è ancora un personaggio che deve compiere, in un modo o nell’altro, il suo destino; questi testi rappresentano vere e proprie theological fictions, costruzioni complesse che mirano a disegnarsi, in un modo efficace, una via di salvezza tranquillizzante, un paradiso su misura.