Several recent finance articles employ the Omega measure, proposed by Keating and Shadwick (2002) - defined as a ratio of potential gains out of possible losses - for gauging the performance of funds or active strategies (e.g. Eling and Schuhmacher, 2007; Farinelli and Tibiletti, 2008; Annaert et al., 2009;...

In this paper we investigate the effects of using a Facebook page exclusively devoted to a first year Mathematics course in a large Italian public university. Posts and discussions supported traditional face-to-face lectures and students could freely post queries and get help from professors and...

In the context of an unprecedented aging process, the role of domiciliary care for older adults is becoming increasingly essential. In order to design effective and proactive policies of formal elderly-care, it is crucial to understand how vulnerable elderly individuals would adjust their...

This paper analyses the relationship between dispositional optimism and stock investments. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Dispositional optimism is found to be a relevant predictor of the ownership of stocks as well as of the share...

This paper evaluates and compares the dynamics of the financial integration process as described by different empirical approaches. To this end, a wide range of methods accounting for several dimensions of integration and a novel evaluation scheme – based on the positive association between...

This paper analyses features of 28 provincial growth-cycles in China's economy from March 1989 to July 2009. We study the multivariate synchronization of provincial cycles and the selection of the number of cycles phases' by means of panel Markov-switching models. We obtain evidence that growth...

This paper estimates the causal effect of parental education on children’s education in 13 European countries, using representative data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). A novel instrumental variable approach is used to solve the endogeneity issue. We combine...

This paper deals with the construction, decomposition and comparison of water footprint time series in 40 countries and one aggregate macro-region, in the period 1995-2009. The analysis of the different “footpaths” allows us to investigate on the possible causes behind the time evolution of...

The aim of the paper is to develop a procedure that allows policy makers to make an ex-ante assessment of a general compulsory amalgamation policy, providing quantitative indications about the possible financial effects. The amalgamation of small municipalities is a widespread practice all over...

The design of financial trading systems (FTSs) is a subject of high interest both for the academic environment and for the professional one due to the promises by machine learning methodologies. In this paper we consider the Reinforcement Learning-based policy evaluation approach known as...