Nanoimplants that Enhance Human Capabilities: A Cognitive‐Affective Approach to Assess Individuals’ Acceptance of this Controversial Technology

Nanotechnology enables the miniaturization of complex devices designed to enhance individuals’ physical and cognitive capabilities and, in the form of nanoimplants, their integration in the human body. It is unknown, however, whether people are willing or not to accept such devices. To shed light on this issue, this research used an extended version of the well‐known technology acceptance model (TAM), adding affective factors to the cognitive components already present in the model. Testing on a sample of 600 individuals yielded statistically significant effects on attitudes toward nanoimplants and intention to undergo nanoimplantation. Conclusions are drawn and implications are discussed.     

University–industry collaboration in Italy: A bibliometric examination

This work investigates public–private research collaboration between Italian universities and domestic industry, applying a bibliometric type of approach.The study is based on an exhaustive listing of all co-authored publications in international journals that are jointly realized by Italian university scientists and researchers in the private sector; this listing permits the development of a national mapping system for public–private collaboration that is unique for its extensive and representative character. It is shown that, in absolute terms, most collaborations occur in medicine and chemistry, while it is industrial and information engineering that shows the highest percentage of co-authored articles out of all articles in the field.In addition, the investigation empirically examines and tests several hypotheses concerning the qualitative–quantitative impact of collaboration on the scientific production of individual university researchers. The analyses demonstrate that university researchers who collaborate with those in the private sector show research performance that is superior to that of colleagues who are not involved in such collaboration. But the impact factor of journals publishing academic articles co-authored by industry is generally lower than that concerning co-authorships with other entities. Finally, a further specific elaboration also reveals that publications with public–private co-authorship do not show a level of multidisciplinarity that is significantly different from that of other publications.     

Fuzzy Value-at-risk: Accounting for Market Liquidity

In this paper we present a value-at-risk measure which accounts for market liquidity. We show that taking into account market liquidity implies a decoupling of valuation of long and short positions. We present a pricing model, named fuzzy measure model, that yields different values for positions of different sign and that can be usefully exploited to account for liquidity risk. This methodology is well-suited to price options when the distribution of the underlying asset is not known precisely, as in the case of implied options in corporate claims or real options. As an example, we apply our pricing technique to an option based model of value-at-risk, in line with the Merton and Perold approach, and we recover different value-at-risk figures for long and short positions.
(J.E.L.: C00, D81, G12).     

Transition and Long-Term Growth: Conventional Versus Non-Conventional Determinants

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Cross-sectional facts for macroeconomists

This article provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on “Cross-Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists”. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and wealth. After describing the motivation and the common methodology underlying this empirical project, we discuss selected results, with an emphasis on cross-country comparisons. Most, but not all, countries experienced substantial increases in wages and earnings inequality, over the last three decades. While the trend in the skill premium differed widely across countries, the experience premium rose and the gender premium fell virtually everywhere. At a higher frequency, earnings inequality appears to be strongly counter-cyclical. In all countries, government redistribution through taxes and transfers reduced the level, the trend and the cyclical fluctuations in income inequality. The rise in income inequality was stronger at the bottom of the distribution. Consumption inequality increased less than disposable income inequality, and tracked the latter much more closely at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. Measuring the age-profile of inequality is challenging because of the interplay of time and cohort effects.     

Pricing the Option to Surrender in Incomplete Markets

New international accounting standards require insurers to reflect the value of embedded options and guarantees in their products. Pricing techniques based on the Black and Scholes paradigm are often used; however, the hypotheses underneath this model are rarely met. We propose a framework that encompasses the most known sources of incompleteness. We show that the surrender option, joined with a wide range of claims embedded in insurance contracts, can be priced through our tool, and deliver hedging portfolios to mitigate the risk arising from their positions. We provide extensive empirical analysis to highlight the effect of incompleteness on the fair value of the option.     

On the Scottish distinctiveness from late scholasticism to the Scottish enlightenment a preliminary perspective

The Review of Austrian Economics - The Scottish Enlightenment is considered a crucial turning point in the history of philosophy. However, as a whole, it cannot be understood without an in-depth...