THE LEGAL DEFENCE OF VICTIMS OF TRAFFICKING LEGISLATIVE AND JURISDICTIONAL PROBLEMS AND GAPS

Although in the last 10 years in Italy there has been a greater sensitivity by the legislature to the trafficking, including in relation to international commitments such as the Palermo Protocol, there are still difficulties and deficiencies in affording effective jurisdictional protection for victims of this shameful social phenomenon. Italy has started to pay a sensitive normative attention to the defence of the victims of trafficking through the art. 18 of the DLvo 286/98I that stipulates the concession of a residence permit for social protection to the people that are subject to trafficking, as well as the possibility to be inserted in programs of assistance and social integration. The aforesaid norm has allowed starting an experience that doesn't have comparisons in Europe. There is rather a protection of individual rights, which is unconditional, at least in the first stage. This is the so called "Social path", which allows the trafficked person to seek help from an association, before and independently by a complaint. The following Law 228/2003 was subsequently incorporated into a path already started four years earlier with the aforesaid Law of 1998 and it should have addressed the problems that had not been handled. The law protects victims of trafficking. In particular it envisaged the establishment of a special assistance program for victims of crimes under Articles 600 ("reduction or maintenance in slavery or servitude"), 601 ("Trafficking in persons") and 602 ("Purchase and sale slave ") of the Italian Penal Code. Victims of exploitation are guaranteed assistance and hospitality. Moreover, the law has radically changed the definition of slavery under Att. 600 Italian Criminal Code, indicating behaviour similar to it or reducing to servitude. It is a rule intended to have a particularly wide scope for punishing behaviour of exploitation in general or in particular the induction and exploitation of prostitution, work performance in conditions of complete subjugation and exploitation of employees against the employer. The original concept of slavery has been extended to include the existence of a network and thus slavery is made not only through violence, threats and deception, but also abuse of authority or profiting from a situation of need, both in order to obtain sexual services, both for the use of a person for specific job performance, or for begging. However there are still debates and open problems. It’s important and necessary to incriminate and tougher penalties to be applied for the crime of trafficking in humans, which involves the violation of basic human rights. We must underline that the crime of slavery was only applied in few cases, especially when people had minor injuries. In most trials relating to such crimes the sentences included milder penalties. Also, one should ensure that the criminal action does not result in an additional stress factor and victimization resulting from inadequate methods of conducting the procedure by those authorities - police and judicial - which should guarantee the rights of individuals harmed by the offence (known as secondary victimization). Special investigation is required for activities on different levels of trafficking, such as trafficking of babies or children to be allocated to begging or forced labour, or domestic servitude. But within a European approach to the problem, we cannot speak only of the gaps of national legislation. All must be framed in the broader dimension of cooperation. It’s important the value of events such as the Protocol between Italy and Romania, signed in Bucharest on July 9 of 2008, which is the source of some transnational cooperation in the areas of intervention of the European Social Fund for the coordination of measures designed to promote the social inclusion of trafficked funded ESF, such as the strategic project "Integrating market labour trafficking victims. We need to promote a strengthening of international cooperation between higher institutions and civil society in the countries mostly involved in this terrible practice.human trafficking, victims, legal process, guaranteed assistance.

Some remarks on the MIll-Frege theory of names

In a recent paper García-Carpintero (2017) argues that proper names possess, in addition to their standard referential truth conditional content, metalinguistic descriptive senses which take part in semantic presuppositions. The aim of this article is twofold. In the first part I present an argument against García-Carpintero’s presuppositional view, which I call the collapse argument. In short, I argue that the view has the unwelcome consequence of making contexts of use and felicitous contexts of use collapse. If this is correct, a presuppositional account of the metalinguistic descriptions allegedly associated with proper names proves incorrect. In the second part I sketch an alternative Millian strategy which is able to account for the evidence which allegedly supports the presuppositional view.Fil: Lo Guercio, Nicolás Francisco. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas - Sadaf; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Mental files and metafictive utterances

Metafictive utterances raise a kind of intuitions (intuitions of truthfulness) that pose a problem for a view that combines a referentialist approach to proper names with an antirealist stance on fictional characters. In this article I attempt to provide a solution to this problem within the framework of mental files. According to my position, metafictive utterances literally express an incomplete proposition while pragmatically conveying a complete one, which accounts for the intuitions of truthfulness. The proposition pragmatically conveyed is 'metarepresentational', I'll argue, in the sense that it is about a mental representation or mental file.As emissões metafictivas despertam intuições de verdade, as quais representam um problema para uma teoria que combine uma posição referencialista quanto aos nomes próprios com um compromisso antirrealista quanto às personagens de ficção. O objetivo deste artigo é proporcionar uma solução para este problema no âmbito da teoria de arquivos mentais. De acordo com a posição desenvolvida, enquanto as emissões metafictivas expressam literalmente uma proposição incompleta, comunicam pragmaticamente uma proposição completa, a qual explica as intuições de verdade. A proposição pragmaticamente comunicada, argumentarei, é “metarrepresentacional”, no sentido de que é sobre uma representação mental ou arquivo mental.Fil: Lo Guercio, Nicolás Francisco. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Filosofía "Dr. Alejandro Korn"; Argentin

Mutual Fund Performance and the Incentive to Generate Alpha

Financial economists have long been puzzled by investor demand for actively managed funds that generate, on average, negative after-fee, risk-adjusted returns. To shed new light on this puzzle, we exploit the fact that funds in different market segments compete for different types of retail investors. Within the segment of funds marketed directly to retail investors, we find that flows chase risk-adjusted returns, and that funds respond by investing more in active management. Importantly, within this direct-sold segment, we find little evidence that actively managed funds underperform index funds. In contrast, within the segment of funds sold through brokers, which we demonstrate face a weaker incentive to generate alpha, we find that actively managed funds significantly underperform index funds. We conclude that the well-known underperformance of the average actively managed fund in the full sample is driven by the large fraction of funds with weak incentives to identify and motivate skilled managers.

Optimal amplification of streamwise streaks in plane jets and their stabilizing effect on the inflectional instability

Optimal transient energy growths supported by the plane Bickley jet are computed for a set of spanwise wavenumbers and Reynolds numbers. It is shown that the maximum energy amplification is proportional to the square of the Reynolds number. The computed optimal streamwise vortices are then used to efficiently force finite amplitude streaks that are shown to stabilize the jet's powerful inflectional instability, which is clearly relevant for a number of applications in the control of free shear flows

The determinants of the flow of funds of managed portfolios: mutual funds versus pension funds

Due to differences in financial sophistication and agency relationships, we posit that investors use different criteria to select portfolio managers in the retail mutual fund and fiduciary pension fund industry segments. We provide evidence on investors’ manager selection criteria by estimating the relation between manager asset flow and performance. We find that pension fund clients use quantitatively sophisticated measures like Jensen’s alpha, tracking error, and outperformance of a market benchmark. Pension clients also punish poorly performing managers by withdrawing assets under management. In contrast, mutual fund investors use raw return performance and flock disproportionately to recent winners but do not withdraw assets from recent losers. Mutual fund manager flow is significantly positively related to Jensen’s alpha, a seemingly anomalous result in light of a relatively unsophisticated mutual fund client base. We provide preliminary evidence, however, that this relation is driven by a high correlation between Jensen’s alpha and widely available summary performance measures, such as Morningstar’s star rating. By documenting differences in the flow-performance relation, we contribute to the growing literature linking fund manager behavior to the implicit incentives to increase assets under management. We show that several forces combine to weaken the incentive for pension fund managers to engage in the type of risk-shifting behavior identified in the mutual fund literature.Mutual funds ; Pensions ; Investments

A physically-based approach for evaluating the hydraulic invariance in urban transformations

Transformation of urban areas satisfies hydraulic invariance (HI) if the maximum flow rate outgoing the area stays unchanged. The HI can be respected by dimensioning appropriate water storage volumes or low impact developments (LID) to balance the soil sealing and ground levelling effects. In order to comply with HI, some Italian regional legislation and river basin authority provide for the creation of storage tanks whose volume must be estimated through simple conceptual rainfallrunoff models. In this work a physically based approach for evaluating HI is proposed. It is based on interpolating the results from a large number of hydraulic simulations conducted using FullSWOF, which is an open source code developed by the University of Orléans. In this software the shallow water equations are solved using a finite volume scheme and friction laws and infiltration models are included. Simulations have been carried out considering the effect of three properties of the area, that is: the saturated hydraulic conductivity of soil, the slope of ground surface and the standard deviation of ground elevation around the mean level. Using the results, interpolating laws for the peak discharge and the critical rainfall duration as function of the three basin parameters have been derived. A parametric hydrograph as a function of the basin parameters and rainfall duration is defined and a HI evaluation method based on routing the parametric hydrograph is proposed. The results from this approach have been compared with those from non-physically based methods currently used, such as the direct rainfall approach and the linear reservoir approach. The comparison shows that the difference between these conceptual methods with that one proposed here is strongly dependent on the runoff coefficient value. It is also not possible to predict whether they are conservative or not

Demand uncertainty In modelling WDS: scaling laws and scenario generation

Water distribution systems (WDS) are critical infrastructures that should be designed to work properly in different conditions. The design and management of WDS should take into account the uncertain nature of some system parameters affecting the overall reliability of these infrastructures. In this context, water demand represents the major source of uncertainty. Thus, uncertain demand should be either modelled as a stochastic process or characterized using statistical tools. In this paper, we extend to the 3rd and 4th order moments the analytical equations (namely scaling laws) expressing the dependency of the statistical moments of demand signals on the sampling time resolution and on the number of served users. Also, we describe how the probability density function (pdf) of the demand signal changes with both the increase of the user’s number and the sampling rate variation. With this aim, synthetic data and real indoor water demand data are used. The scaling laws of the water demand statistics are a powerful tool which allows us to incorporate the demand uncertainty in the optimization models for a sustainable management of WDS. Specifically, in the stochastic/robust optimization, solutions close to the optimum in different working conditions should be considered. Obviously, the results of these optimization models are strongly dependent on the conditions that are taken into consideration (i.e. the scenarios). Among the approaches for the definition of demand scenarios and their probability-weight of occurrence, the moment-matching method is based on matching a set of statistical properties, e.g. moments from the 1st (mean) to the 4th (kurtosis) order

Star power: the effect of Morningstar ratings on mutual fund flows

Morningstar, Inc., has been hailed in both academic and practitioner circles as having the most influential rating system in the mutual fund industry. We investigate Morningstar’s influence by estimating the value of a star in terms of the asset flow it generates for the typical fund. We use event-study methods on a sample of 3,388 domestic equity mutual funds from November 1996 to October 1999 to isolate the “Morningstar effect” from other influences on fund flow. ; We separately study initial rating events, whereby a fund is rated for the first time on its 36-month anniversary, and rating change events. An initial five-star rating results in average six-month abnormal flow of $26 million, or 53 percent above normal expected flow. Following rating changes, we find economically and statistically significant abnormal flow in the expected direction, positive for rating upgrades and negative for rating downgrades. Furthermore, we observe an immediate flow response, suggesting that some investors vigilantly monitor this information and view the rating change as “new” information on fund quality. Overall, our results indicate that Morningstar ratings have unique power to affect asset flow.Mutual funds

Informational efficiency in distressed markets: The case of European corporate bonds

This paper investigates the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on informational efficiency by carrying out a long-memory analysis of European corporate bond markets. We compute the Hurst exponent for fifteen sectorial indices to scrutinise the time-varying behaviour of long-range memory, applying a shuffling technique to avoid short-term correlation. We find that the financial crisis has uneven effects on the informational efficiency of all corporate bond sectors, especially those related to financial services. However, their vulnerability is not homogeneous and some nonfinancial sectors suffer only a transitory effect.Fil: Fernández, Aurelio. Universitat Rovira I Virgili; EspañaFil: Guercio, María Belén. Universidad Provincial del Sudoeste; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Martinez, Lisana Belén. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; Argentina. Universidad Provincial del Sudoeste; Argentin