Fearless Friday: Elena Perez-Zetune

Consistently involved in programs and initiatives addressing social issues related to children, migrant communities, and education, Elena Perez-Zetune ’14 fearlessly allows her assumptions to be challenged, her time given in service, and her energy spent on encouraging younger generations. Elena has served with several different programs on campus run by the Center for Public Service, such as El Centro, Immersion Projects, Heston Internships, Casa de la Cultura, and the LIU Migrant Education Program. Growing up in Gettysburg, Elena has had the unique opportunity to run and organize some of the same programs she participated in as a child, and has been able to learn from both sides of the experience

Down at the Cross

For the first thirteen years of my familial life, I walked a block to devoutly pray to statues with open arms, promising open gates- my radiant mother walking with once thin father, hand in hand like a teenage couple. My sister, with her thick night-black curly hair, skipped and fell every other step, not due to young age but simply an unfortunate quarrel with gravity. Always trailing close behind was my brother clutching his precious cards shouting, “I choose you Pikachu” along the way. From kindergarten through eighth grade, I walked through the hallways of my Catholic primary school. The walls were decorated with images of quintessential heavenly salvation held up by blue sticky tack; the images portrayed old breaded white males sitting upon a throne surrounded by fair winged women. Although the perfect Kodak moment of God had never been captured, I was taught to kneel to these images that resembled many around but never my own. [excerpt

Dark Forces Searches at KLOE-2

Direct searches of dark matter are performed at accelerator facilities. The existence of a new vector boson has been postulated in different scenarios where in the most basic scheme the coupling to the SM can be achieved via a kinetic mixing term due to the U boson. The KLOE experiment at DA$\phi$NE searched for the U boson both in Dalitz decays of the $\phi$ meson and in continuum events. For all of these searches an upper limit for the U boson coupling $\epsilon^{2}$ has been established in the mass range $50 \, \text{MeV} < m_U < 1000\,\text{MeV}$. A summary of the different models and searches along with results are presented.Comment: Acta Phys. Polon. B 201

Institutional diversity in the euro area: Any evidence of convergence?

In recent years differences in the institutional structure across euro area countries are becoming a cause of concern both for some individual Member States and for the functioning of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). From a global competitiveness perspective, we deal with the diversity in the institutional environment in the EMU. In particular, we assess whether the changes in the state of institutions provide convergence across euro area countries between 2006 and 2015. In addition, among the institutional indicators considered, we compute which institutional aspect contributes more to overall inequality in the state of institutions, as well as the contribution of each country to inequality considering as benchmark the country with the highest institutional quality. According to these country contributions, we highlight distinct patterns of convergence between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ euro area countries and raise potential links between the institutional changes across euro area countries and both the differences in the intensity of the financial and economic crisis, and the policy responses in terms of fiscal consolidation applied by the respective national governments.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The Children of the Angel Guardian Home

Since the early 1900\u27s, the Angel Guardian Home in Dyker Heights, New York, has been known as a safe haven for orphans in the community. Now that the orphanage is being sold, former children who lived there are finally telling their stories about what it was like to be in the care of the Sisters of Mercy

TOOLS USED IN DECISION MAKING

Decision making is one of the important tasks of every manager. The process of taking decisions has to be based on knowledge. For optimizing this process some software solutions has been created. In this article we tried to summarize some of the features which exists in some software applications.decision making, risk solver

Who takes the cake Effects of ECB monetary policy across income classes

This work provides evidence on the effects of monetary policy on the income class structure via stimulating economic activity and employment in Eurozone countries over the period 2007Q32016Q1. Based on European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data, we compute the share of the market income perceived by each income class (lower, lower-middle, upper-middle, and upper) for the states that originated the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU11). We analyse the impact of monetary policy impulses under a Bayesian Vector Autoregressive approach and find that a monetary easing shock involving a decrease in nominal interest rates tends to increase the income share of middle classes at the expense of a smaller income share of the upper class, while, the lower class is not significantly affected. Our findings highlight the identified effects are mostly triggered by short-term interest rates cuts as long as they tend to vanish as the monetary policy proxy is located further in the yield curve. This suggests that the egalitarian impacts of monetary policy on market income distribution are to a lesser extent driven by decisions modifying longer-term interest rates.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Multidimensional poverty in the EU: rethinking AROPE through a multi-criteria analysis

At risk of poverty or social exclusion rate (AROPE) constitutes the pivotal indicator of living conditions and poverty in the European Union. Nevertheless, as a multidimensional poverty measure, it has some drawbacks that significantly reduce its utility. In this paper, we propose an alternative multi-criteria approach that provides some innovations for the computation of multidimensional poverty in the European countries. We first propose a normalization formula for each dimension by using a double point of reference. We then put forward alternative aggregation functions that permit diverse degrees of substitutability across dimensions. This new formulation allows us to go beyond focusing merely on the rate of people classified as AROPE, making it possible to evaluate aspects such as the intensity of multidimensional poverty and how changes over time are distributed across population in terms of shared prosperity, as showed in an illustration for the EU28 countries.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Monetary policy and middle class

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent period of financial and economic instability have forced central banks to implement ultra-loose monetary policies for combating the downturn and the stagnation of inflation, which has led the question about how monetary policy might affect inequality to the foreground of economic and political debates. This paper attepts to evaluate how monetary policy implemented in the Euro area (EURO-11) has affected two aspects of income distribution, namely, the size of middle class dimension and its mobility. To this end, an econometric model is estimated based on data from 2003 to 2015 for the set of countries belonging to the Economic and Monetary Union that originated the Union (EMU1999). We apply the vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology to country-level panel data as a first approach of the short-term dynamics among the considered variables, where the impulse-response functions have been orthogonalized due to the existing serial correlation between the unobserved terms. Subsequently, this analysis is complimented with a more robust one. Since our variables are non-stationary but indeed co-integrated, the vector error correction model (VECM) allows us to consider the medium-term relationship between monetary policy and income inequality via the stimulus of the economic activity.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech