1,721,125 research outputs found
Neurofisiologia e fenomenologia della percezione
No full textGli AA riportano alcuni aspetti della fenomenologia della percezione ed evidenziano come l’uomo, con la nascita dell’automobile, si sia visto progressivamente sostituito da essa, colpevolizzato, per la sua stessa esistenza. Questo è un grave errore perché così l’uomo alla guida è un uomo a rischio. Il soggetto che guida deve essere invece rafforzato ed esaltato sui compiti meccanici e razionali insieme, considerando che il rapporto uomo-automobile non può pregiudicare e negare il primo, essendo essa il suo prodotto. Quando ciò non avviene si verifica una prevalenza della meccanica nei confronti della ragione e dell’etica esistenziale.
Gli AA, dopo l’analisi fisicoesistenziale del guidatore, specificano come la propensione alla guida dovrebbe migliorare anche la conoscenza e la capacità riflessiogena in merito ad importanti eventi traumatici, registrati nella casistica incidentale, simulati per la verifica psicoattitudinale, per creare una menomazione centrale, utile poi, negli eventi improvvisi di guida
Dimenticati agli antipodi :l'odissea dei sommergibili italiani in Estremo Oriente, 1943-1946
No full textCredit Guarantee Institutions and SME Finance
No full textIn many countries mutual guarantee schemes and institutions help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to improve their access to credit, by reducing existing information asymmetries and improving credit conditions for those who benefit from such guarantees. In European economies, mostly characterised by small firms, mutual guarantee institutions play a very significant role in sustaining national economies. This book analyzes the functioning of guarantee systems for SMEs in countries where these schemes play an important part. Furthermore, it investigates the expected evolutions of the guarantees offered by the mutual guarantee institutions in the framework of Basel II, since only under certain conditions are the guarantees eligible under the New Basel Capital Accord. The cross-country comparison emphasizes the regulatory and institutional framework, the structure, dimension and operational features, the performance and the policy makers' role
CORPORATE INSURANCE AND DEBT CAPACITY: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM ITALY
No full textIn the current economic phase, characterized by the difficulty of firms to obtain financing, a key role in banks/enterprises relations is played by Basel II Framework, which accurately correlates banks’ capital requirement to risks, thanks to a more precise creditworthiness assessment (Tarantola, 2008).
The containment of risks inherent in bank financing can be carried out ex ante, through an adequate screening, which allows the proper assessment of enterprises’ economic and financial situation and a sound composition of the total loan portfolio, and ex post, through guarantees, which allow to benefit from a loss reduction only after insolvency has occurred (Boot et al., 1991; Erzegovesi, 2007, 2008; Gai, 2005, 2006; Malinconico, 2000, 2008; Stiglitz, Weiss, 1981, 1986).
From this perspective, Basel II Framework brings important changes, since life insurance and surety policy are “eligible” guarantees for Credit Risk Mitigation. Nevertheless, banks could offer a better pricing to borrowers not because they are less risky, but because the whole operation would need a lower capital requirement. Therefore, corporate risks reduction – which would allow, in the absence of credit rationing, a more profitable debt capacity – is necessarily achieved through an appropriate “umbrella insurance”, able to cope with both direct and indirect loss.
The “therapeutic” capacities of such coverages lead to a synallagmatic relation between corporate insurance purchases and increase in enterprises’ creditworthiness, since enterprises’ risk management decreases their overall riskiness and improves their creditworthiness (Mayers, Smith, 1982; Thakor, 1982; Davidson et al., 1992; Zou, Adams, 2008, 2009; Ania, Irsa, 2010).
In the economic literature there is a lack of attention about the capability of the insurance system to favour debt capacity by enterprises. Therefore, this work aims at investigating the existence of a “virtuous” relation between corporate insurance purchases, credit risk and debt capacity. Such aim can be pursued through different steps:
A. review of literature, to identify the reasons of corporate demand for insurance;
B. analysis of Italian enterprises’ corporate insurance purchases;
C. drafting of a questionnaire, to submit to a sample of the main banks working in Italy, intended to investigate whether and how the possession of corporate insurance is taken into consideration in the determination of enterprises’ creditworthiness;
D. drafting of a questionnaire, to submit to a sample of the main insurance companies working in Italy, intended to identify what kind of role they play in the relation with enterprises and which insurance products they offer
Country risk: ECAIs rating and measurement framework
No full textBoth academia and practitioners long shared the belief that default on the part of a sovereign entity was an extremely rare event. A similarly strong opinion was also that countries could not go bankrupt and, therefore, government bonds could be considered a good proxy of risk-free rates, notwithstanding the more or less recent cases of default and debt restructuring that have occurred in emerging countries. Consequently, sovereign risk assessment models were mainly oriented towards the analysis of interest rate or liquidity risk, rather than default risk. Within the approaches used to measure the possible default of a sovereign issuer, a fundamental role is played by rating agencies, which issue “Sovereign Credit Ratings” consisting of an assessment of a State’s future capability and willingness to fulfil its obligations towards its creditors. Both academics and practitioners agree that country risk is multidimensional, and the traditional measures and sovereign ratings from specialised agencies are unable to capture the specific risks of the different countries. This is especially true after the international financial crisis, which has triggered a negative spiral between sovereign risk and the credit risk of banking intermediaries, exhibiting the different transmission channels through which sovereign risk affects bank funding. Rises in sovereign risk adversely affect banks’ funding costs through several channels, due to the pervasive role of government debt in the financial system. Three major international agencies – Moody’s Investor Service, Fitch Investor Service and Standard & Poor’s – consider and assess these event risks differently in order to determine their sovereign credit rating. Starting from summer 2011, tensions in sovereign credit rating were quickly transmitted to the banking systems. In fact, sovereign downgrades have direct negative repercussions on the cost of banks’ debt and equity funding, because this is a channel through which sovereign risk adversely affects banks’ funding costs. In particular, sovereign ratings generally represent a ceiling for the ratings of domestic banks. This complex of factors has brought into the limelight, within the financial system, the so-called country risk, and has shown that the determinants of this risk have become more complex (sovereign debt structure and composition, the EMU countries sharing the euro currency and monetary policy, the ratings from the ECAIs – the External Credit Agency Institutions, etc.), intensified, and strongly interrelated as a consequence of the international financial crisis. From this perspective, the present study aims at: A. Outlining a frame for the definition of country risk and its determinants; B. Carefully examining the qualitative and quantitative information included in the different sovereign rating methodologies employed by the major ECAIs; C. Analysing the country risk measurement frameworks existing in practice and/or literature, and applying, some of them, to the Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and Greece
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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