10,412 research outputs found
The Determinant of Money Laundering: Evidence from Italian Regions
Following the INTERPOL’s definition, money laundering is: “any act or attempted act to conceal or disguise
the identity of illegally obtained proceeds so that they appear to have originated from legitimate sources”. Illegally
obtained funds are laundered and moved around the world using front companies, intermediaries and other money
transmitters. In this way, the illegal funds remain hidden and are integrated into the legal economy. Such type of crime
undermines financial institutions’ and jurisdictions’ reputation, compromises investors’ trust in them, and therefore
weakens the entire financial system. By using annual data for the Italian regions (NUTS-2) over the period 2008 to 2015,
this work aims to investigate the determinants of money laundering in Italy. Given the high heterogeneity in terms of
economic and institutional characteristics, as well as for the activity of organized crime in financial-related activities,
Italy is a compelling case study. Our main findings reveal that in most of the Italian regions enforcement activities do
exert significant deterrence on criminal behaviors: a negative relationship between enforcement and illegal trafficking of
waste can be identified only for very high levels of enforcement efforts. Moreover, we find that the major determinants
influencing the rate of money laundering differ between northern-central and southern regions, confirming the existence
of a regional dualism. In particular, while in the northern-central area the crime rate is positively related to the level of
corruption, the incidence of mafia-type crimes and negatively to the education attainment, in the southern regions money
laundering is positively related to the size of the gaming and gambling sector
Time-scale analysis non-local diffusion systems, applied to disease models
The objective of the present paper is to use the well known Ross-Macdonald
models as a prototype, incorporating spatial movements, identifying different
times scales and proving a singular perturbation result using a system of local
and non-local diffusion. This results can be applied to the prototype model,
where the vector has a fast dynamics, local in space, and the host has a slow
dynamics, non-local in space
Early star formation traced by the highest redshift quasars
The iron abundance relative to alpha-elements in the circumnuclear region of
quasars is regarded as a clock of the star formation history and, more
specifically, of the enrichment by SNIa. We investigate the iron abundance in a
sample of 22 quasars in the redshift range 3.0<z<6.4 by measuring their rest
frame UV FeII bump, which is shifted into the near-IR, and by comparing it with
the MgII 2798 flux. The observations were performed with a device that can
obtain near-IR spectra in the range 0.8-2.4 um in one shot, thereby enabling an
optimal removal of the continuum underlying the FeII bump. We detect iron in
all quasars including the highest redshift (z=6.4) quasar currently known. The
uniform observational technique and the wide redshift range allows a reliable
study of the trend of the FeII/MgII ratio with redshift. We find the FeII/MgII
ratio is nearly constant at all redshifts, although there is marginal evidence
for a higher FeII/MgII ratio in the quasars at z~6. If the FeII/MgII ratio
reflects the Fe/alpha abundance, this result suggests that the z~6 quasars have
already undergone a major episode of iron enrichment. We discuss the possible
implications of this finding for the star formation history at z>6. We also
detect a population of weak iron emitters at z~4.5, which are possibly hosted
in systems that evolved more slowly. Alternatively, the trend of the FeII/MgII
ratio at high redshift may reflect significantly different physical conditions
of the circumnuclear gas in such high redshift quasars.Comment: Replaced to match the accepted version (ApJL in press), 5 page
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