LUISS Guido Carli, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali

Regional cabinet members (RCMs) are key political actors in subnational politics, especially in federal systems or in countries that have undergone a process of regionalization or devolution, even though they are still less studied than federal or national ministers. Italy and its regionalization process represent an interesting case study to understand how and under what conditions members of regional cabinets can exit from politics or move upwards, or downwards the different tiers of government. By using an original data-set of 721 RCMs in ordinary statute regions we tested through multinomial regression analysis whether political and institutional or personal factors influence their movements (both legislative or executive) upward, that is, toward national and/or European positions, backward toward local (both provincial or municipal) positions or their exit from politics. Our results show that both political-institutional and individual factors matter. In particular, displaying a previous national career favors upward movements while being a technician or independent favors the exit from politics.

Meaning of harmonization of company law in European Union. Models of boards of directors across Europe. Italian company law.

Any business venture may be carried out by individuals or by a group of persons. In the first case, we have sole proprietors. In the three jurisdictions sole proprietorships are characterized by an organization. The concept of organization is alike.

Nowadays, companies represent the most important legal form, in terms of capitalization, to carry out economic activity everywhere in the world. The big companies we know by name are all set as a public company or as a corporation (e.g., Nike, Apple, Barbour, Enel, Eni, etc.). Overview of the history of companies. Common features for public companies in most jurisdictions. Characteristics of US corporations.

The United Kingdom is a common law jurisdiction. However, the main source of company law is the Companies Act (CA) dated 2006, which has been in force since November 2008. Many of the provisions contained in the Act have been inserted, over the years, to implement European directives and are therefore common to other European jurisdictions: the United Kingdom was part of the European Union until 31 January 2020, when the so-called “Brexit” took place. The provisions deriving from European directives are still in force despite the UK’s exit from the European Union (see Sections 6.1 and 6.2 below on European directives). The Companies Act is completed by the Model Articles of Association, drafted by the Secretary of State, which function as standard default articles that a company can use; by way of regulation, the Model Articles are provided as a schedule to the Companies Act 2006. Under the Companies Act 2006, the types of companies are private companies limited by shares, private companies limited by guarantee, and public companies. Allocation of powers between the general meeting of shareholders and the board of directors. Directors' duties and liabilities.

We document a sizeable increase in the frequency of price adjustments following the large energy shocks of 2022. We use a tractable New Keynesian model, calibrated to the preshock data, to interpret such a pattern. The calibration highlights the state dependence of firms’ decisions: prices are adjusted rapidly when markups are misaligned. In the model, a large cost shock triggers a swift increase in the frequency of price adjustments, causing a rapid pass-through from costs to prices. Time-dependent models, such as the Calvo model, miss this frequency response, failing to capture the sudden inflation surge after a large shock. (JEL D22, E12, E31, L11, L66, Q43)

In this brief section, I explore the dynamics of the Jordanian context, characterized by its complexity yet predictability, where the autocratic power dynamics embedded in the constitutional framework exacerbate corruption and erode civil liberties (Bustani in Jordan’s new opposition and the traps of identity and ambiguity. Jadaliyya, 2011a). This research focuses on the 2011 Arab Awakening as another lens to better understand the Hashemite Kingdom’s shifting narrative identities, with the goal of identifying another pivotal moment in its history—or lack thereof. I will begin by tracing the events leading up to and following the Jordanian uprising.

During the Ottoman era, the territory that came to be known as Transjordan was not recognized as a single administrative unit. Instead, it was identified by its various districts: Ajloun, al-Balqa, al-Karak, and Ma’an. Collectively, these areas bore little resemblance to today’s Kingdom of Jordan, forming a narrow strip of land from the Jordan Valley westward to the eastern desert along the pilgrimage route. The Ottomans did not exercise administrative control over the vast desert areas east of this road, which remained predominantly under Bedouin influence.

I will begin this section by exploring the insights from Int. K1 regarding the situation in Kuwait during the decade leading up to the so-called Arab Spring.

I will examine the Kuwaiti identity starting from the pivotal decades of the 1920s and 1930s and following historical, geopolitical, and economic turning points along with Int. K1’s insights. However, before venturing into the intricacies of these and subsequent eras, a brief prologue—akin to the prelude of a tale—is necessary. This detour mirrors a metaphorical trek across the desert sands, in pursuit of water.

The book is based on extensive fieldwork, including over eighty open, semi-structured interviews that I conducted in 2016 and 2017 (averaging forty-five minutes each) and a subsequent round of twenty open, unstructured interviews conducted in 2022–23 (lasting between two and five hours each). Both interview rounds took place in Jordan and Kuwait and were conducted in Arabic, English, and occasionally Italian.

In this paper we investigate a model with habit formation and two types of substitute goods. We are inspired by the classical models in e.g. Carroll et al. (Am Econ Rev 90(3):341–355, 2000) where on the contrary only one good is considered. Such a family of models, even in the case of 1 good, are difficult to study since their utility function is not concave in the interesting cases (see e.g. Bambi and Gozzi (J Math Econ 91:165–172, 2020)), hence the first order conditions are not sufficient. We are inspired by the situation in which there is a lockdown in the economy and one sector closes whereas habits develop on the second good. This more elaborate model will be the subject of future work. In the present paper, we carry out a first analysis in the case of no lockdown. We introduce and explain the model which considers two goods where one of the two is related to habit stock and where the utility function is expressed as the sum of two utility functions. For this model, we provide some first results using the dynamic programming approach. We prove that the value function is a viscosity solution of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation, and also some results on the qualitative behaviour of the value function are furnished. Such results will form a solid ground over which a deep study of the features of the solutions can be performed.

The ‘Danse Macabre’ was a pictorial representation of the mutated attitude towards death generated by the catastrophic plague that decimated the European population during the 14th century. Did the Covid-19 epidemic lead to a similar, nihilistic, visual result?

We investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on domestic party competition over the European Union (EU) in its immediate aftermath, with a focus on the case of Italy. Drawing on a discursive neo-functionalist framework, we perform OLS regression analysis on a dataset of more than 10,000 Facebook posts retrieved via CrowdTangle. Our findings show that Italian parties converged towards supportive EU positions following the full-scale Russian invasion due to a decrease in anti-EU claims. Furthermore, the degree of convergence of individual parties varied depending on their ideological orientation. While extreme left-wing and green parties significantly decreased their discursive opposition to the EU, anti-Europeanism did not abate in radical right parties, which remained consistent in their Eurosceptic stances throughout the analysed timeframe. Compared to COVID-19, the different surrounding international context and policy fields involved in this crisis are associated with different party reactions vis-à-vis the EU.

Objective This article critically evaluates the European Commission’s 2024 Implementing Regulation (IR) on conflicts of interest (COIs) management for stakeholders in the European Union (EU) Joint Clinical Assessment (JCA), with a focus on individual experts such as clinicians and patient representatives. Key findings The IR is the first EU-level framework to assess COIs in the context of health technology assessment (HTA). The regulation requires experts involved in the JCA to submit annual declarations of interest for both financial and non-financial interests and presents a matrix on whether these conflicts should disqualify them from participating in the joint work. We compared the IR to COIs-management approaches from other European national HTA bodies and found that the IR is closely modelled after the French guidelines. Concerns include potential over-representation of experts from a small number of countries, lack of guidance on organisational COIs, and ambiguities in how the size of financial interests are disclosed. Unclear resource allocation for enforcement could also hinder compliance. Conclusions The IR marks progress in EU-wide HTA collaboration, but improvements in transparency, expert diversity, and comprehensive COIs management are needed to ensure impartiality in the JCA process.

Public sector professionals are often negatively portrayed with ascriptions such as “ineffective” and “lazy.” Such negative connotations might disadvantage public sector organizations when trying to attract applicants, as it can reflect negatively on individuals' social identities. With this pre‐registered experimental study, we examine stereotypes of public and private sector workers with and without a signal of specific professions present across both the public and private sector. We examine how this influences attraction in the initial phases of a job search before tangible job attributes become visible. Our study among 290 job seeking citizens in the United Kingdom provides evidence for a generic public sector worker bias, but the bias diminishes when the specific profession is known. Furthermore, we find that job seekers are less attracted to public employment and that this relationship is influenced by a negativity bias against public sector workers. We discuss implications of the study.

This paper analyses Italian party positions on the EU's response to the Russo-Ukrainian war, singling out the adoption of sanctions against Russia, the provision of military support to Kiev, enlargement to Ukraine and the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees into the Union's territory as the four main dimension of such a response. The paper draws on the literatures on cleavage politics, the inverted U curve and the differentiated forms of politicisation, thereby testing theory-driven research hypotheses through a qualitative content analysis of Italian parties' Facebook posts in the three months following the outbreak of the conflict, combining an inductive and a deductive approach. The findings show that party families are a good explanatory factor behind Italian party positions vis-à-vis the EU's response to the war outbreak as parties belonging to the same family shared a similar stance on the four dimensions of such a response. On the contrary, the Europeanism/Euroscepticism divide does not explain Italian party positions on the EU's reaction to the Ukrainian conflict as Europeanist parties split over the EU's provision of weapons to Ukraine about as much as Eurosceptic partis split over the adoption of sanctions against Moscow. Finally, the paper shows that policy issues in the EU's response to the war (such as sanctions and arms delivery) were much more salient for and contested by Italian political parties than constitutive issues (such as enlargement and asylum).

Given a real differentiable function f, we say that a point p is a stationary point for f if the first derivative of f vanishes at p. It is commonly believed that isolated stationary points can be classified by the first derivative test either as local extrema or inflection points. But, unless f is analytic, this is not always the case. In this article we briefly review some basic facts concerning real functions and the first derivative test, and then some $C^k$ and $C^\infty$ counter-examples are provided.