Is social capital associated with health ? Evidence from a study on the elderly italians

In the last decades there had been undoubted improvements in medicine and living conditions, still the distribution of health within and between regions is facing an increasing unbalance and many researchers from different fields have tried to understand why some individuals are more exposed to disease and mortality than others. An increasing interest on social capital as a key determinant for health has recently developed. This paper analyzes the association between social capital and self-perceived health among older adults in Italy. We used a multilevel approach to take into account the hierarchical structure of the population: individuals are nested in families which are nested into regions. Multilevel logistic regressions are performed using data on the fourth wave of the Survey on Health and Retirement in Europe. Two components of social capital are considered, bonding and bridging, in order to understand if relations inside or outside an individual’s inner circle are associated differentially with his/her health. The results demonstrate that both bridging and bonding are associated with self-reported health status. Consequently, in Italy, social capital plays an important role in explaining the heterogeneity in health perception among individuals

On cscK resolutions of conically singular cscK varieties

In this note we discuss the problem of resolving conically singular cscK varieties to construct smooth cscK manifolds, showing a glueing result for (some) crepant resolutions of cscK varieties with discrete automorphism groups

Infinite geodesic rays in the space of Kahler potentials

In this paper we explore the connection between special degenerations of algebraic manifolds and geodesics in the space of Kahler metrics. We provide a new and general geometric construction of nontrivial solutions for the geodesic equation. We show how to associate to any special nontrivial degeneration a geodesic of inifite length.Comment: 17 page

Pensions and the Dynamics of Inequality in Italy: Initial Evidence, 1987-2014

As certified by Eurostat, in 2015 Italy was among the European countries with the most pronounced income inequality, with a “20:20 ratio” of 5.8. That is, the income share of the richest 20% of households is 5.8 times that of the poorest 20%. Only Serbia, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, Latvia, Estonia e Portugal displayed a higher inequality ratio that year. Even in the broader group of all OECD countries, including the US and the UK, Italy is among the most unequal. The main difference between Italy and the US or Britain is that in Italy inequality had gradually decreased through the 1980s, scoring a minimum in 1991, before then rising dramatically (Fiorio, 2011; Brandolini and Smeeding, 2008). In the US and the UK, by contrast, inequality has increased steadily. The social costs of income inequality can be substantially aggravated or mitigated by a country’s welfare system, so it is important to analyze the structures that the various nations have adopted. The main differences concern both amount of expenditure and the form in which benefits are delivered. For Italy, between 2000 and 2008 the bulk of social expenditure went for old age pensions (59.1% compared with an average of 43.7% in Europe). The article examines trends in inequality in Italy from 1987 to 2014 and analyzes the changing distribution of individual incomes by source (payroll employment, self-employment, pension) and by geographical area