SECURITY PERCEIVED AS A CULTURAL CONCEPT: THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE

The present paper aims to analyze the political acceptance of the concept of security as it helps understanding the issue of national and global security. Power is the most influential factor that determines the behavior of states in the international system and therefore it is the main enemy concerning global peace and order. It is worth to highlight how strategic culture can improve the perception of security. Each state focuses upon its own interests and this aspect does not guarantee that the other states will cooperate for maintaining peace and world order and this situation is continuously feeding the global insecurity. This study focuses on the concept of political culture of the United States analyzing the relationship between culture and politics within the framework of the political system

Bank Non-Performing Loans – a Panel Data-Based Analysis in European Context. Study Case: Germany

Humanity has recently been crossed by periods of great crises, and banks have had a particularly important role in keeping the economy afloat and in relaunching economic activities in these difficult periods. If we refer to the stability, health and efficiency of the banking system, one of the important factors mentioned in the specialized literature is the size of Non-Performing Loans. The present work carries out a time and space analysis of this indicator for the EU member countries, observing its behavior during major crises. Thus, in the distribution of European countries there was a decrease in the median level of the indicator and in its variability, but also an increase in the predominance of countries with low non-performing loans ratio. At the same time, the case of Germany is studied, with the strong and weak points of its banking system and the key determinants of the rate of non-performing loans, for the main commercial banks in Germany are identified, using a panel data regression model. The results revealed that the indicator-level is negatively and significantly correlated with the loan-deposit ratio and the degree of financial profitability and positively and significantly correlated with the total value of assets and the degree of capital adequacy. From this emerges the need to promote policies to stimulate the prudent behavior of banks in granting loans, in order to ensure the stability and health of the banking system in European countries

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements