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In order to provide useful tools for researchers in the design of actions to promote participation in web surveys, it is key to study the characteristics that define the profile of a “web respondent”, so that specific interventions can be planned. In this contribution, which draws on data collected during the 2019 housing population census in Italy, we define the set of familial and geographical characteristics that correspond to a greater probability that the interviewed household will choose to respond online, by estimating a multilevel model. The profile of a “computer-assisted web interview household” (CAWI-H) is then defined, on the basis of the structural characteristics of this population. Moreover, the geographical distribution of households is studied according to their distance from the CAWI-H profile. The results show that households that are more distant from the CAWI-H profile have characteristics that correspond to segments of the population generally affected by economic and social fragility; they are mainly elderly, foreigners, residents in small towns, and people with a low level of education. It is to these households in particular that survey designers can address specific actions that can enhance their willingness to participate in web surveys.

Recent international financial research finds that a firm’s capital structure is not only influenced by firm- and industry-specific determinants, but also by country-specific factors. Starting from the last decade’s studies on the country effect and addressing some areas of potential development in empirical testing, we test, on a sample of seven apparently similar European countries and more than 800,000 variously sized firms (from the BACH-ESD database) over a ten year period (2000-2009), the direct effects of country characteristics on leverage, as well as their mediating role on the effects of firm- and industry-specific determinants, by using a simultaneous equation model (SEM) never used before by any scholar in this field. The emerging empirical evidence: i) highlights the relevance of many institutional, financial, and macroeconomic country characteristics; ii) confirms the better ability of banks in selecting, monitoring, and financing small and risky firms; iii) shows that the demand-side perspective can better explain some counter-intuitive effects of some determinants on leverage.

Food insecurity is one of the most important issues in determining a country's level of development, being at the core of sustainable growth. It affects all countries in the world, because even in countries with high current levels of income or food availability, the stability of food access and utilization may change over time. Comparisons of food insecurity in different economic and demographic subpopulations across countries provide a better understanding of the complex phenomenon and support policies aimed at improving the well-being of populations and alleviating hunger. Even though definitions and measures of food insecurity have been widely debated, both in the political and scientific spheres, for decades, until very recently data referring to a univocal measure of food insecurity was lacking at the global level. Only beginning in 2014 was the FAO Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) used to perform a global survey, in 147 countries, with a sample of more than 150,000 individuals. This study presents an analysis of food insecurity based on information relating to individuals' own experience of their food insecurity, measured by FIES, together with other meaningful personal and household characteristics. The objective of this work is to assess which factors can determine individual food insecurity. Food insecurity presents marked differences depending on the level of development of the country under consideration. To take these factors into account, countries have been grouped together using a cluster analysis, based on the indicators forming the UN Human Development Index. The model, estimated both at the global level and for each group of countries, allows us to identify the economic, social, and demographic characteristics related to food insecurity, adding further evidence to the existing literature. Overall, the factors that have a significant impact on the risk of food insecurity include level of education, number of children in the household, and location of the household

The theory of value has been based ever since Adam Smith on the idea that the market prices of commodities, those at which actual trade takes place, gravitate around a central position known as natural prices. This article seeks to develop a statistical idea of the process in question and suggests in particular that market prices can be said to gravitate around natural prices if the probability of their means being very close to natural prices after t observations tends to 1 as t tends to infinity. A set of possible conditions leading to that result is also presented.

Least Orthogonal Distance Estimator (LODE) of Simultaneous Equation Models’ structural parameters is based on minimizing the orthogonal distance between Reduced Form (RF) and the Structural Form (SF) parameters. In this work we propose a new version – with respect to Pieraccini and Naccarato (2008) – of Full Information (FI) LODE based on decomposition of a new structure of the variance-covariance matrix using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) instead of Spectral Decomposition (SD). In this context Total Least Square is applied. A simulation experiment to compare the performances of the new version of FI LODE with respect to Three Stage Least Square (3SLS) and Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) is presented. Finally a comparison between the FI LODE new and old version together with few words of conclusion conclude the paper., Statistica, Vol 73, No 2 (2013)

It is argued that the organization of services by local authorities should take into account both the demographic features of the usually resident population and the spatial dimension of the territory involved. Focusing on the Italian region of Tuscany, the paper seeks to identify homogeneous and spatially contiguous areas between the municipal and regional levels. Demographic indexes of usually resident population and spatial attributes of each Tuscan municipality are used as the input of a spatial clustering and regionalization model in order to obtain nareas that minimize the internal heterogeneity of the demographic structure under the constraint of spatial contiguity