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In the last few decades, measures to reconcile work and family life have risen in mutual interaction with a rising rate of dual earnership. However, dual earnership has (to date) been adopted in a socially uneven way in most European societies. Therefore, one may wonder whether the activation measures have brought about a loss of vertical redistribution in welfare states. We address this question by focusing on the interaction of three measures of family policy and their overall distributional effect in Europe, with the Belgian region of Flanders as the case in point. We develop a fine-grained analysis to reveal the budgetary impact of the variation in use and generosity, and find that today in Flanders the redistributive effect of child benefits is largely undone by subsidized childcare and parental leave benefits. If parents’ employment is to be generalized, this case study suggests that more attention is required regarding the universal use of reconciliation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Evaluates the performance of proposed tests for structural breaks in the conditional variance dynamics of asset returns. Use of high-frequency data; Identification of the number and location of multiple breaks; Size and power of the tests for detecting breaks in the conditional variance.

Describes the proposed extensions of the continuous record asymptotic analysis for rolling sample variance estimators. Treatment of integrated volatility; Establishment of the efficiency of different weighting schemes; Presence of deviation from normality absolute values.

This article comments on the article "Realized Variance and Market Microstructure Noise," by Peter R. Hansen and Asger Lunde. The authors make two arguments regarding Hansen and Lunde's article. They believe that corrections for microstructure noise do not matter in predicting future volatility and that the best predictor is power variation uncorrected for microstructure noise. Their comments are divided into three sections. The first section deals with decomposition issues, the second covers volatility forecasting and the third focuses on volatility measures other than increments in quadratic variation.

Introduction: Prolonged intense exercise has often been associated with the impairment of right ventricular (RV) function after activity, whereas this is rare for the left ventricle (LV). The effect of prolonged exercise on the heart has not been adequately measured during exercise itself. Methods: We performed real-time cardiac magnetic resonance imaging at rest and during incremental exercise in 14 male endurance athletes (mean ± SD; age = 36 ± 6 yr, BMI = 23.1 ± 1.94 kg•m−1) 1-3 wk before (baseline) and immediately after a 150-km cycling event (end-of-race) to measure LV and RV end-diastolic and end-systolic volumes (EDV and ESV), ejection fraction (EF), and ventricular-arterial coupling (stroke volume [SV]/ESV). Results: End-of-race RV EDV was unchanged from baseline at rest but was significantly increased during near-maximal exercise (235 ± 18 vs 217 ± 24 mL, P < 0.0001). Resting RV ESV was higher end-of-race (100 ± 16 vs 93 ± 15 mL, P = 0.009), which became more appreciable during near-maximal exercise (75 ± 15 vs 60 ± 14 mL, P < 0.0001). RV EF, although unchanged at rest, was significantly decreased during near-maximal exercise (68% ± 5% vs 73% ± 4%, P = 0.001). LV volume measures were similar at baseline and end-of-race. Therefore, the effect of endurance activity on the RV and LV was significantly different (P < 0.0001). Cardiac output increased to similar values at near-maximal exertion before and at the end of the race. However, whereas LV SV/ESV was unchanged, RV SV/ESV was attenuated end-of-race (P = 0.02 for interaction with race setting). Conclusions: Intense endurance exercise does not affect LV volume or function but results in RV dilatation and reduced RV EF, which becomes even more significant during exercise. Alterations in RV ventricular-arterial coupling suggest that this may be an expression of exercise-induced RV contractile impairment rather than changes in autonomic or loading conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]