Is social capital associated with health ? Evidence from a study on the elderly italians

In the last decades there had been undoubted improvements in medicine and living conditions, still the distribution of health within and between regions is facing an increasing unbalance and many researchers from different fields have tried to understand why some individuals are more exposed to disease and mortality than others. An increasing interest on social capital as a key determinant for health has recently developed. This paper analyzes the association between social capital and self-perceived health among older adults in Italy. We used a multilevel approach to take into account the hierarchical structure of the population: individuals are nested in families which are nested into regions. Multilevel logistic regressions are performed using data on the fourth wave of the Survey on Health and Retirement in Europe. Two components of social capital are considered, bonding and bridging, in order to understand if relations inside or outside an individual’s inner circle are associated differentially with his/her health. The results demonstrate that both bridging and bonding are associated with self-reported health status. Consequently, in Italy, social capital plays an important role in explaining the heterogeneity in health perception among individuals

Blowing up and desingularizing constant scalar curvature K\"{a}hler manifolds

This paper is concerned with the existence of constant scalar curvature Kaehler metrics on blow ups at finitely many points of compact manifolds which already carry constant scalar curvature Kaehler metrics. We also consider the desingularization of isolated quotient singularities of compact orbifolds which already carry constant scalar curvature Kaehler metrics.Comment: Greatly revised version. 43 page

On cscK resolutions of conically singular cscK varieties

In this note we discuss the problem of resolving conically singular cscK varieties to construct smooth cscK manifolds, showing a glueing result for (some) crepant resolutions of cscK varieties with discrete automorphism groups

Infinite geodesic rays in the space of Kahler potentials

In this paper we explore the connection between special degenerations of algebraic manifolds and geodesics in the space of Kahler metrics. We provide a new and general geometric construction of nontrivial solutions for the geodesic equation. We show how to associate to any special nontrivial degeneration a geodesic of inifite length.Comment: 17 page

On the resolution of extremal and constant scalar curvature Kaehler orbifolds

In this paper we give sufficient conditions on a compact orbifold with an extremal Kaehler metric to admit a resolution with an extremal Kaehler metric. We also complete the Kaehler constant scalar curvature case.Comment: This paper, together with the next one by the same authors, contains more general results than arxiv.org/abs/1402.5919 (by the same authors), which will then be withdraw