Trust, sociability and stock market participation

We investigate the effects of both trust and sociability for stock market participation, the role of which has been examined separately by existing finance literature. We use internationally comparable household data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe supplemented with regional information on generalized trust from the World Value Survey and on specific trust to financial institutions from Eurobarometer. We show that trust and sociability have distinct and sizeable positive effects on stock market participation and that sociability is likely to partly balance the discouragement effect on stockholding induced by low generalized trust in the region of residence. We also show that specific trust in advice given by financial institutions represents a prominent factor for stock investing, compared to other tangible features of the banking environment. Probing further into various groups of households, we find that sociability can induce stockholding among the less well off in Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland where stock market participation is widespread. On the other hand, the effect of generalized trust is strong in countries with limited participation and low average trust like Austria, Spain, and Italy, offering an explanation for the remarkably low participation rates of the wealthy living therein

Internet of Things nella società: ambiti applicativi e problematiche

Con il crescente sviluppo delle tecnologie IoT e la connessione di un numero sempre maggiore di oggetti alla rete, si stanno aprendo nuove possibilità per le aziende e i consumatori, dovute anche all’abbassamento progressivo dei costi di beni e servizi. Questa tesi tratta dell’evoluzione dell’Internet of Things fino ad oggi e delle possibili applicazioni future, evidenziando le soluzioni orientate ad una gestione collaborativa di beni e servizi e considerando, anche da un punto di vista giuridico, le problematiche che più rischiano di frenare lo sviluppo di queste tecnologie in futuro, quali la sicurezza dei sistemi IoT, le questioni di possesso e accesso ai dati di tali sistemi e le preoccupazioni relative alla privacy dei soggetti interessati

Household debt and social interactions : [Version 1 März 2012]

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consumer, and informal loans. We find robust social effects on borrowing, especially among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers; and on indebtedness, suggesting a link to financial distress. We employ a number of approaches to rule out spurious associations and to handle correlated effects

A Demand System with Social Interactions: Evidence from CEX

A Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System that allows for social interactions is described and then estimated on CEX data. Social interactions are introduced as mean budget shares and depend on peer membership and visibility. Peer identification is obtained by means of a similarity index which measures the probability of group membership. Reflection problem is tackled directly and therefore estimation is carried on with a Generalized Spatial 2SLS that deal with two types of endogeneity: the first due to contemporaneous choices of households, the second due to contemporaneous choice of goods. The results support the hypothesis that total expenditure allocation to budget shares depends both on social interaction and visibility.Social Interactions, Demand System, Similarity, Endogeneity, Spatial Econometrics

Price Dispersion, Search Externalities, and the Digital Divide

We propose a model of price competition where consumers exogenously differ in the number of prices they compare. Our model can be interpreted either as a non–sequential search model or as a network model of price competition. We show that i) if consumers who previously just sampled one firm start to compare more prices all types of consumers will expect to pay a lower price and ii) if consumers who already sampled more than one price sample (even) more prices then there exists a threshold –the digital divide– such that all consumers comparing fewer prices than this threshold will expect to pay a higher price whereas all consumers comparing more prices will expect to pay a lower price than before.

Social interaction effects in an inter-generational model of informal care giving

We study jointly the health perception of the elderly and the care giving decision of their adult children. Social interactions play a crucial role: elder parents' health perception depends on relations with household members. On the other hand adult children make their care giving decisions strategically, meaning that each of them considers his siblings' decision. We find empirical evidence which support this claim using the 2004 wave of the SHARE survey. We estimate social interaction effects by means of methods taken from the spatial econometric literature. Health perception relation with care giving depends on the determinants of adult children's decision to care: Parents' health may be modelled as a common good for parents and children; the latter's decision may be driven by bequest motives or by pure altruism and/or cultural values. We test implications of the model thanks to the unique features of the SHARE dataset: it is trans--national, allowing to control for cultural and institutional differences, it contains information on health status of over-50 Europeans and details on their social and intergenerational relations.Insurance, Social SHARE, care giving, social interactions, health, aging

Progettazione di un sistema di categorizzazione delle regressioni per il compilatore Rust

Il linguaggio di programmazione Rust ha subito una crescita costante negli ultimi tempi e da cinque anni è votato come il linguaggio più amato dagli utenti nell'annuale sondaggio di StackOverflow. Parte fondamentale del linguaggio è il compilatore, che in questo caso si occupa anche di tutti quei controlli aggiuntivi che distinguono Rust da altri linguaggi come C/C++ e che ne garantiscono la sicurezza. Il ciclo di vita del compilatore prevede il rilascio di una nuova versione ogni 6 settimane, un intervallo di tempo molto piccolo se confrontato con altri progetti come GCC, che rilascia una nuova versione ogni anno. Un tempo così ridotto rende più difficile verificare la correttezza della modifiche introdotte e quasi del tutto inutilizzato per tale motivo è il testing da parte degli utilizzatori del linguaggio, che avrebbero a disposizione una finestra molto ristretta per testare manualmente le nuove funzionalità. Per permettere un rilascio così frequente con la confidenza di non introdurre bug o regressioni viene utilizzato Crater. Crater, prima di una nuova release, testa automaticamente tutto il codice Rust ottenibile online su GitHub e su crates.io, il registry pubblico ufficiale. I risultati ottenuti sono poi presentati ai team di rilascio e del compilatore per sistemare eventuali criticità trovate. Il progetto di questa tesi si inserisce in tale contesto per migliorare l'analisi dei dati ottenuti e automatizzare il lavoro di categorizzazione degli errori. In tale modo si semplificano le operazioni di triage delle problematiche individuate e si alleggerisce il carico sugli sviluppatori. In particolare, si suddividono gli errori in base al codice riportato e si analizzano le relazioni di dipendenza tra di essi

Divorce and well-being. Disentangling the role of stress and socio economic status

We investigate the happiness variations associated with divorce by drawing data from a retrospective panel dataset based on the third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and covering 14 European countries. This dataset proposes as a powerful tool to control for reporting style heterogeneity in happiness self-evaluations. Indeed, in addition to individual fixed-effects, we control for full migration trajectories in order to remove bias in well-being evaluations produced by cross-country heterogeneity in the cultural norms and societal values individuals have been exposed during their life-cycle. Happiness is found to increase in the period after divorce for both men and women. We show that this pattern goes through a decrease in stress and financial hardship