Perceived climate change risk and global green activism among young people.

In recent years, the increasing number of natural disasters has raised concerns about the sustainability of our planet's future. As young people comprise the generation that will suffer from the negative effects of climate change, they have become involved in a new climate activism that is also gaining interest in the public debate thanks to the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement. This paper analyses the results of a survey of 1,138 young people in a southern Italian region to explore their perceptions of the extent of environmental problems and their participation in protests of green movements such as the FFF. The statistical analyses perform an ordinal classification tree using an original impurity measure considering both the ordinal nature of the response variable and the heterogeneity of its ordered categories. The results show that respondents are concerned about the threat of climate change and participate in the FFF to claim their right to a healthier planet and encourage people to adopt environmentally friendly practices in their lifestyles. Young people feel they are global citizens, connected through the Internet and social media, and show greater sensitivity to the planet's environmental problems, so they are willing to take effective action to demand sustainable policies from decision-makers. When planning public policies that will affect future generations, it is important for policymakers to know the demands and opinions of key stakeholders, especially young people, in order to plan the most appropriate measures, such as climate change mitigation.

Mixed frequency composite indicators for measuring public sentiment in the EU.

Monitoring the state of the economy in a short time is a crucial aspect for designing appropriate and timely policy responses in the presence of shocks and crises. Short-term confidence indicators can help policymakers in evaluating both the effect of policies and the economic activity condition. The indicator commonly used in the EU to evaluate the public opinion orientation is the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI). Nevertheless, the ESI shows some drawbacks, particularly in the adopted weighting scheme that is static and not country-specific. This paper proposes an approach to construct novel composite confidence indicators, focusing on both the weights and the information set to use. We evaluate these indicators by studying their response to the policies introduced to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in some selected EU countries. Furthermore, we carry out an experimental study where the proposed indicators are used to forecast economic activity.

Multiway clustering with time-varying parameters.

This paper proposes a clustering approach for multivariate time series with time-varying parameters in a multiway framework. Although clustering techniques based on time series distribution characteristics have been extensively studied, methods based on time-varying parameters have only recently been explored and are missing for multivariate time series. This paper fills the gap by proposing a multiway approach for distribution-based clustering of multivariate time series. To show the validity of the proposed clustering procedure, we provide both a simulation study and an application to real air quality time series data.