Forty-two consecutive patients have had severe eyelid ptosis corrected by intraorbital frontalis flap advancement as a motor unit to substitute for the function of the levator muscle. This technique has avoided the need for the linking structure necessary in the standard frontalis sling approach and has improved the direction of pull to more closely mimic that of a normal levator. This simple technique includes elevation of the innervated frontalis muscle flap and the creation of a pulley near the insertion of the orbital septum at the superior orbital rim, which redirects the lid movement along the surface of the globe rather than lifting it from the globe's surface toward the brow. This type of displacement is produced because the muscle is directed posteriorly by the pulley, so that it conforms to the plane of the levator aponeurosis all the way down to the tarsal plate. In addition, to improve the remaining function of the levator muscle (if any) and to facilitate voluntary positioning of the eyelid, the levator aponeurosis is shortened by plication. Symmetry is created by intervention on the contralateral eyelid to provide symmetrical supratarsal creases.

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The interferences among some financial, economic and monetary variables are checked as an indicator of economic performance in the long run and for the monetary policy applied between the Great Moderation (GM) of 1987-2001 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. For achieving this target, some Granger causality tests are applied to GDP growth, credit growth, and lending interest of 36 countries of the EU and the OECD for the full sample of 1987-2012 and the sub-sample of 2002-2007. Results corroborate the interferences among these variables for the discretionary monetary policy applied immediately after the GM, within the “Ad Hoc Era” or “lax period”, and independence when monetary policy was correctly applied and rules-based.

The efficiency of tax systems is an important topic for policy makers and academics. We focus on the efficiency of applying VAT to traditional banking services, a significant issue where a consensus has yet to be reached since the first debates more than two decades ago. This paper discusses one of the most relevant models of tax efficiency on banking services under VAT, the model developed by Jack (2000). This author shows that explicit fees and commissions should be taxable under VAT, while implicit fees covered by banking spreads should be zero-rated. An alternative theoretical approach is developed in this paper, proposing the taxation of both explicit and implicit fees of financial services under VAT at the same tax rate, which should also be the same rate applied to all other goods and services.

Summary Schoenmakers–Coffey matrices are correlation matrices with important financial applications. Several characterizations of positive extended Schoenmakers–Coffey matrices are presented. This paper provides an accurate and fast method to obtain the bidiagonal decomposition of the conversion of these matrices, which in turn can be used to compute with high relative accuracy the eigenvalues and inverses of positive extended Schoenmakers–Coffey matrices. Numerical examples are included.