The determinants of whistleblowing in public administrations: an analysis conducted in Italian health organizations,universities, and municipalities

The aim of this paper is to examine which variables are most important in encouraging whistleblowing in Italian public administrations, as a result of the compulsory application of the anti-corruption Law No. 190/2012. Our research is based on an empirical analysis of 365 public administrations: 86 hospitals, 137 health agencies, 39 universities, and 103 major Italian municipalities.

The results show that whistleblowing seems to occur more frequently in large public administrations, to be associated with formal procedures and an organizational proceduralization that encourages individuals to actually blow the whistle, and that it is only partially correlated to training and education.     

Output-inflation cycles in an economy with staggered wage setting

The question whether increased price flexibility is stabilizing in macromodels of the business cycle has been recently questioned by De Long and Summers (1986). The present paper is an attempt to reconsider the question by applying some methods from the theory of nonlinear dynamics, especially bifurcation theory, to the analysis of a dynamic model with sluggish price adjustment. It is argued that, when inflation plays a destabilizing role through the Mundell effect, a stable closed orbit representing the perfect-foresight dynamics of the output-inflation pair may appear in the vicinity of a stationary state. Moreover, bifurcation theory is applied to find analytical results about the relation between the amplitude of the cycles and the ‘degree’ of flexibility of prices. This relation is shown to be positive in a variety of cases.     

DO ARBITRAGE‐FREE PRICES COME FROM UTILITY MAXIMIZATION?

In this paper we ask whether, given a stock market and an illiquid derivative, there exists arbitrage‐free prices at which a utility‐maximizing agent would always want to buy the derivative, irrespectively of his own initial endowment of derivatives and cash. We prove that this is false for any given investor if one considers all initial endowments with finite utility, and that it can instead be true if one restricts to the endowments in the interior. We show, however, how the endowments on the boundary can give rise to very odd phenomena; for example, an investor with such an endowment would choose not to trade in the derivative even at prices arbitrarily close to some arbitrage price.     

Classification of longitudinal career paths

The aim of the present article is to classify, in terms of contractual stability, the careers of the workers in a specified territorial context (Province of Milan-Italy), utilizing large administrative archives. The final goal is a synthetic clustering that identifies individuals in homogeneous groups regarding the longitudinal sequences of contractual typologies occurring in the evolution of vocational experiences during their career, identifying, on the one hand, the worker profiles that remain stable in each contractual typology and on the other hand, the profiles that improve or worsen contractual stability over time. Methodologically, our approach uses a combination of scaling methods to estimate stability scores of each contractual typology and Latent mixture models to cluster similar trajectories. Specifically, the scores of contractual stability were performed by Multidimensional Scaling with individual preferences, taking into account the ordinal nature of distances among contractual typologies and the heterogeneity factors of the subjects. Further, Latent Growth Mixture models, capitalizing the longitudinal property of data sequences, were proposed to identify distinctive, prototypical developmental trajectories of contractual stability within the analyzed population.     

Perceptions of Industrial Design: The “Means” and the “Ends”

It is widely accepted that industrial design can play an important role in the development of innovative products, but integrating design‐thinking into new product development (NPD) is a challenge. This is because industrial designers have very different perspectives and goals than the other members of the NPD team, and this can lead to tensions. It has been postulated that the communications between NPD managers and industrial designers are made more difficult because each group uses very different language. This research made the first empirical investigation of the language used by designers and managers in describing “good” and “poor” industrial design. In‐depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 19 managers and industrial designers at five leading companies. Multiple sources of data were utilized, including the repertory grid technique to elicit the key attributes of design, from the perspective of managers and designers. Using a robust, systematic coding approach to maximize the validity and reliability of qualitative data analysis, it was established that managers and industrial designers do not use a completely different vocabulary as previously supposed. Rather, it was found that managers and industrial designers use some common terms augmented by additional terms that are specific to each group: managers are commercially orientated in the “ends” they want to achieve and designers perceive more antecedents (“means”) necessary to achieve their “ends”—iconic design. This research led to a grounded conceptual model of the role of design, as perceived by managers and industrial designers. The implications of the results achieved are wide: they indicate how managers and designers can interact more productively during NPD; they highlight the need for more research on the language of designers and managers; and they point to issues that need to be covered in the education of industrial designers. Finally, this work suggests how managers and designers can engage in a more fruitful dialogue that will help to make NPD more productive.     

Tax Deferral and Mutual Fund Inflows: Evidence from a Quasi‐Natural Experiment

We propose a new method to identify the impact of a change in the tax burden on mutual fund inflows. We use quasi‐experimental data from Italy where, starting from July 2011, the tax regime for domestic mutual funds was changed from an accruals basis to a realisation basis, while the taxation of foreign funds remained on a realisation basis. We find that the reform has had a positive effect on net inflows of Italian funds (the treated group) with respect to foreign funds (the control group). The effect is both economically and statistically significant. Moreover, there is no evidence that the increase in the demand for Italian funds came at the expense of foreign funds.     

Do larger severance payments increase individual job duration?

This paper analyzes the effect of severance payments on the probability of separation at given tenure, wages and other individual and firm characteristics. It studies a mandatory deferred wage scheme of the Italian labour market (Trattamento di Fine Rapporto, TFR). Deferred wages increase job duration if two conditions hold: wages are rigidly set outside the employer-employee relationship, and past provisions are accumulated at interest rates that are below market rates. Under such circumstances, workers who withdraw from their accumulated stock of unpaid wages should experience, at given tenure, a subsequent increase in the probability of separation. This prediction appears empirically robust and quantitatively sizeable. A withdrawal of 60% of the TFR stock (the median observed withdrawal) increases the instantaneous hazard rate by almost 20%. In other words, an individual with at least ten years of tenure that experiences an early withdrawal increases his/her hazard rate from 10% to about 12%. The empirical result takes into account the existence of unobserved heterogeneity and a variety of further robustness tests.