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Snow White is one of the most popular fairy tales worldwide. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story has been reconsidered multiple times during the current trend of producing fairy tale adaptations. Especially the Evil Queen has become an object of further examination in many recent instalments of the story. In this chapter, I analyse the revision of Snow White's stepmother in the book series The Lunar Chronicles (2012–2016), the films Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), as well as the TV-series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Compared to other villains in recent fairy tale adaptations, who are, like Maleficent, redeemed, the queen remains an embodiment of evil and terror in most adaptations. I outline the depiction of the Evil Queen in present-day US-American fairy tale narratives, assessing what makes her the most villainous woman in all the fairy tale realms and questioning why many of these stories try to understand but do not forgive her. The focus of this investigation is on the backstory that she is equipped with, her crimes, and her ultimate fate. Although she has been abused, traumatized, and betrayed, she seems to remain an uber villain, not only attempting to kill her stepdaughter but also destroying nature, starving her people, and spreading a deadly virus. This kind of representation might result from the fact that her opponent is by the very name the purest fairy tale princess ever known.

Some of the most recognizable ‘evil’ fairy tale characters are the stepmothers; second-wives who enter happy households, and seek to subjugate their step-children. This character arc is due to be dismantled. Patriarchal regimes over time have constructed realities where women and power do not go together. In early-to late-modern (white, European) societies, patriarchal structures placed restrictions on the decisions women could make with their lives. This meant that women with status were left with very few options to earn an income. The aim for this analysis is to show this distortion of upper-class female reality by analysing the portrayal of the stepmother characters in four fairy-tale film narratives released since 2000, focusing on the Cinderella and Snow White narratives (two of the more widely disseminated fairy-tale stories). By illustrating how little information is given about their lives before re-marrying, this chapter will demonstrate how audiences are still ignorant to the backdrop of wealthy male superiority and the patriarchal structures that would lead to a woman remarrying for economic security, showing them in a more sympathetic light.

Italian worker cooperatives display a high proportion of profits reinvested into asset locks: there is some literature investigating their function, but little has been said about workers' attitude toward them. In this chapter we therefore investigate what workers' motivations are regarding reinvesting profits into asset locks. We propose to interpret them as a common good and we inquire which factors may increase workers' willingness to contribute to it. We test two arguments that are provided in the literature on collective action: the effect of having a long-time perspective within the cooperative and the effect of displaying “collective” motivations and preferences other than self-regarding. We perform this test by means of a survey among workers of cooperatives affiliated to Legacoop Ravenna in Italy.

We identify a positive effect of both factors, although with some distinction. At a first glance, we find a positive correlation between a longer time horizon and a greater concern for profit reinvestment; when looking closer at the data, we nevertheless see a more complex relationship as two other aspects come into the game: the employment insurance role of worker cooperatives and the “feeling of belonging” that links workers to the firm. The positive effect of this second aspect on the willingness to reinvest into locked assets is strong, although it only appears among worker-members. Moreover, its effect seem to become greater as workers' involvement in decision making increases.

Pesaran and Smith (2011) concluded that Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models were sometimes a straitjacket which hampered the ability to match certain features of the data. In this chapter, the authors look at how one might assess the fit of these models using a variety of measures, rather than what seems to be an increasingly common device – the Marginal Data Density. The authors apply these in the context of models by Christiano, Motto, and Rostagno (2014) and Ireland (2004), finding they fail to make a match by a large margin. Both of these models feature more shocks than observed variables, resulting in the empirical shocks having a singular density, and so making them correlated. When correlated one can neither interpret impulse responses nor perform variance decompositions. Against this, there is a strong argument for having a straitjacket, as it enforces some desirable behavior on models and makes researchers think about how to account for any non-stationarity in the data. The authors illustrate this with examples drawn from the SVAR literature and also more eclectic models such as Holston, Laubach, and Williams (2017) for extracting an estimate of the real natural rate.

A motif, as defined by Jean-Charles Seigneuret (1988, p. 17), is an ‘essential part of a contemporary academic discipline known as thematology or thematics’ and that ‘two factors may explain the rise of the thematological method: its interpretive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history of ideas’.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first introduced the story of Snow White and her evil stepmother the Queen in 1812. Decades later, the character of the Queen, who later becomes the Evil Queen, is depicted in copious narratives and several different mediums. A central parallel in most of the representations of this character is that she is presented as evil. As such, how the Evil Queen character is represented in media sees a congruence of specific aesthetical characteristics, which combines to symbolize a rhetorical motif for evil.

This chapter is intended to address efforts to improve management control systems and processes, including budgeting, accounting and reporting, within the context of a responsibility framework in government. The theory of management control is explored and then management control reform in the U.S. federal government is assessed in terms of progress towards meeting the objectives of the theoretical model. Then, the U.S. experience is compared with the efforts to reform management control in Italian local governments.

This article reviews the literature on the econometric relationship between DSGE and VAR models from the point of view of estimation and model validation. The mapping between DSGE and VAR models is broken down into three stages: (1) from DSGE to state-space model; (2) from state-space model to VAR( ∞ ); (3) from VAR( ∞ ) to finite-order VAR. The focus is on discussing what can go wrong at each step of this mapping and on critically highlighting the hidden assumptions. I also point out some open research questions and interesting new research directions in the literature on the econometrics of DSGE models. These include, in no particular order: understanding the effects of log-linearization on estimation and identification; dealing with multiplicity of equilibria; estimating nonlinear DSGE models; incorporating into DSGE models information from atheoretical models and from survey data; adopting flexible modeling approaches that combine the theoretical rigor of DSGE models and the econometric model’s ability to fit the data.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.

Should the central bank target asset price inflation? In their 1999 paper Bernanke and Gertler claimed that price stability and financial stability are “mutually consistent objectives” in a flexible inflation targeting regime which “dictates that central banks … should not respond to changes in asset prices.” This conclusion is straightforward within their framework in which asset price inflation shows up as a factor “augmenting” the IS curve. In this chapter, we pursue a different modeling strategy so that, in the end, asset price dynamics will be incorporated into the NK Phillips curve. We put ourselves, therefore, in the best position to obtain a significant stabilizing role for asset price targeting. It turns out, however, that inflation volatility is higher in the asset price targeting case. After all, therefore, targeting asset prices may not be a good idea.

The collapse of Italian economy has coincided with the global financial crisis to which derivatives are suspected to be responsible of its propagation. For this reason, this study aims to examine whether the use of derivatives affects the profitability of Italian banks during both the global financial crisis period and the recession period of Italian economy. To reach this goal an appropriate econometric procedure namely the dynamic Generalized Method of Moments system is applied using data from 22 Italian banks over the long period 2005–2017. A series of bank-specific indicators are used to explain the effect of overall derivatives and each derivative instrument separately on Italian banks’ profitability. The results of regressions panels indicate that in general derivatives as well as measured in the whole or splitting up in instruments specifically in forwards, options, and, in particular, swaps affect positively the profitability of Italian banks. The main conclusion is that – despite the episode of economic recession in Italy – Italian banks boost their profitability by using derivatives.

As practical contribution, policy-makers in Italy should throw out the assumption of the implication of derivatives in the fragility of the banking system. On the contrary, they should pave the way easily for Italian banks’ managers to deal with derivatives and look out for the real problems of the recent collapse of the Italian economy.