The analysis of what human capital (HC) is has a long history and culminates in the acknowledgment that HC and its growth are very important for both cognitive education (cognitive skills (CSs)) and personal life (noncognitive skills (NCSs)) and that CSs and NCSs have a strong reciprocal...

This chapter aims to provide suggestive evidence on how the Lombardy region dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and discuss future challenges for the Lombardy healthcare system. After an introduction to the wide spread of the virus inside the region, we describe the Lombardy health system...

We demonstrate the use of a multidimensional extension of the latent Markov model to analyse data from studies with repeated binary responses in developmental psychology. In particular, we consider an experiment based on a battery of tests which was administered to pre-school children, at three...

We propose a causal analysis of the mother’s educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have a causal interpretation. The model is applied to a...

The evaluation of nursing homes and the assessment of the quality of the health care provided to their patients are usually based on the administration of questionnaires made of a large number of polytomous items. In applications involving data collected by questionnaires of this type, the...

We develop a recursion for hidden Markov model of any order h, which allows us to obtain the posterior distribution of the latent state at every occasion, given the previous h states and the observed data. With respect to the well-known Baum-Welch recursions, the proposed recursion has the...