Total efficient risk priority number (TERPN): a new method for risk assessment

Safety is one of the most important issues in modern industrial plants and industrial activities. The Safety Engineering role is to ensure acceptable safety levels of production systems, not only to respect local laws and regulations, but also to improve production efficiency and to reduce manufacturing costs. For these reasons, the choice of a proper model for risk assessment is crucial. In this context, the present research aims to propose a new method, called Total Efficient Risk Priority Number (TERPN), able to classify risks and identify corrective actions in order to obtain the highest risk reduction with the lowest cost. The main scope is to suggest a simple, but suitable model for ranking risks in a company, to reach the maximum effectiveness of prevention and protection strategies. The TERPN method is an integration of the popular Failure Mode Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) with other important factors in risk assessment.     

A copula-VAR-X approach for industrial production modelling and forecasting

World economies, and especially European ones, have become strongly interconnected in the last decade and a joint modelling is required. We propose here the use of copulae to build flexible multivariate distributions, since they allow for a rich dependence structure and more flexible marginal distributions that better fit the features of empirical data, such as leptokurtosis. We use our approach to forecast industrial production series in the core European Monetary Union (EMU) countries and we provide evidence that the copula-Vector Autoregression (VAR) model outperforms or at worst compares similarly to normal VAR models, keeping the same computational tractability of the latter approach.     

Is family leadership always beneficial?

There has been much debate concerning the performance of family firms and the drivers of their performance. Some scholars have argued that family management is to blame when family firms go wrong; others claim that family management removes costly agency problems and encourages stewardship. Our thesis is that these disagreements can only be resolved by distinguishing among different types of family firms. We argue that family CEOs will outperform in smaller firms with more concentrated ownership and underperform in larger firms with more dispersed ownership; they will do neither where firms are smaller and ownership is more dispersed or firms are larger and ownership is more concentrated. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Price discovery and trade fragmentation in a multi-market environment: Evidence from the MTS system

This paper proposes new metrics for the process of price discovery on the main electronic trading platform for euro-denominated government securities. Analysing price data on daily transactions for 107 bonds over a period of 27 months, we find a greater degree of price leadership of the dominant market when our measures (as opposed to the traditional price discovery metrics) are used. We also present unambiguous evidence that a market’s contribution to price discovery is crucially affected by the level of trading activity. The implications of these empirical findings are discussed in the light of the debate about the possible restructuring of the regulatory framework for the Treasury bond market in Europe.     

A Remark on Voters' Rationality in a Model of Representative Democracy

Voting games are characterized by the emergence of dominated strategies, that would be iteratively deleted by rational players. In this note we show, via an example, how applying iterated dominance restricts the set of equilibrium outcomes in Besley and Coate's (1997) citizen-candidate model of representative democracy.     

On the speed of convergence of some urn designs for the balanced allocation of two treatments

The present paper deals with sequential urn designs for the balanced allocation of two treatments.Wei (1977, 1978b) was among the first authors to suggest an algorithm based on the probabilistic properties of the generalized Friedman urn and recently Chen (2000) has suggested the Ehrenfest design, namely a sequential procedure based on the Ehrenfest urn process. Some extensions of these algorithms are discussed: in particular we focus on a generalization of Chen's procedure, called the Ehrenfest-type urn designs, recently introduced by Baldi Antognini (2004). By analyzing some convergence properties of the Ehrenfest process, we show that for an Ehrenfest-type urn it is possible to evaluate the variance of the design at each step and analyze the convergence to balance. Furthermore, the generalized Friedman urn and the Ehrenfest-type procedures are compared in terms of speed of convergence. The Ehrenfest design proposed by Chen converges to balance faster than the other urn procedures.     

Pension systems and intragenenerational redistribution when labor supply is endogenous

In models with exogenous labor supply, a reallocation of fundsfrom a wage-related pension to a basic pension affects inequalitythrough changes in the pension paid, redistributing resourcesfrom the rich to the poor. We show that in a model with endogenouslabor supply, another effect is present: indeed changes of thebenefit formula have an impact on the labor/leisure choice.This effect goes in the opposite direction of the standard effectthat is also present in models with exogenous labor supply andit could be quite relevant, also depending on the differentassumptions on the working of the labor market. In particular,under specific assumptions on the utility and the productionfunctions, inequality is unaffected by a reallocation of fundstowards the basic pension. However this result changes if aminimum wage is introduced, since in this case inequality turnsout to be reduced.     

Productivity, innovation and R&D: Micro evidence for Italy

By exploiting a rich firm level data-base, this paper presents novel empirical evidence on the effect of process and product innovations on productivity, as well as on the role played by R&D and fixed capital investment in enhancing the likelihood of introducing innovations at the firm level. Our results imply that process innovation has a large impact on productivity. Furthermore, R&D spending is strongly positively associated with the probability of introducing a new product, whereas fixed capital spending increases the likelihood of introducing a process innovation. The latter result might reflect the fact that new technologies are frequently embodied in new capital goods. However, the effect of fixed investment on the probability of introducing a process innovation is magnified by R&D spending internal to the firm. This implies that R&D can affect productivity growth by facilitating the absorption of new technologies.