Economic valuation of cultural heritage sites: A choice modeling approach

Despite growing attention by researchers and policy makers on the economic value of cultural heritage sites, debate surrounds the use of adequate methods. Although choice modeling techniques have been applied widely in the environmental economics field, their application in tourism and cultural economics has been much more limited. This paper contributes to the knowledge on the economic valuation of cultural heritage sites through a national choice modeling study of Old Parliament House, Australia. The study sought to value marginal changes in several attributes of this site and revealed that only some of them are valued positively: extending the period of temporary exhibitions, hosting various events, and having ‘shop and café’ and ‘fine dining’. Advantages of using a mixed logit model are provided and managerial and policy implications are discussed.     

Foreign ownership,firm performance,and the geography of civic capital

It is well established in the literature that foreign affiliates are subject to a series of governance and assimilation costs that may deteriorate their performance. This is particularly relevant for firms which have been recently acquired by foreign investors. We employ the variation in civic capital across Italian provinces as an exogenous determinant of these governance costs. We claim that the effect of foreign ownership on productivity is less favorable in areas where civic capital is low. As the level of local civic capital increases, the scope for opportunistic behavior is reduced, which makes the governance of foreign affiliates easier and improves their performance. We take this prediction to the data and find confirmation of our conceptual framework. Our analysis uncovers the importance of the geographic heterogeneity of informal norms and institutions in analyzing the nexus between foreign ownership and performance.     

The wage-push hypothesis: The Italian case

In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the extent to which all the strike variables that I know of are correlated with the rate of wage inflation. The general conclusion is that the standard wage-push hypothesis performs very poorly.     

The effect of auditor litigation risk on clients' access to bank debt: Evidence from a quasi-experiment

We exploit staggered state-level shocks to third-party auditor legal liability in the U.S. to test whether auditor litigation risk affects client companies' access to private debt markets. We find that an exogenous increase in auditor litigation risk leads to an increase in both clients' likelihood of receiving bank loans and the average amount of the bank loans that clients receive. In support of our proposed mechanism that auditor litigation risk leads to improvements in clients' audit and financial reporting quality, we find that these same shocks lead to a reduction in accruals, an increase in going-concern opinions, a decrease in restatements, and an improvement in accruals' ability to predict future cash flows. We also find that increased auditor litigation risk leads to an increase in the contractibility of clients’ accounting numbers, as proxied by the use of debt covenants, and a decrease in the cost of borrowing.     

Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship: sectoral patterns in a sample of European high-tech firms

This paper studies the relative importance of prior knowledge and resources available to a startup at the time of its founding across technologies. Our analysis is based on a survey submitted to the founders of new innovative ventures patenting in the biotech, electronics and medical devices technologies. Our findings show that pre-entry knowledge about customers’ needs and characteristics, about the technology and about potential suppliers and competitors differentially affect the technological and market entrepreneurial choice of the surveyed firms. These results suggest the existence of patterns of entrepreneurial activities that are technology-specific.     

Trade,foreign direct investments (FDI) and income inequality: Empirical evidence from transition countries

The aim of the article is to verify whether trade and inward foreign direct investments (FDI) may affect income distribution in a sample of 17 Transition Countries (TCs) over the period 1990–2006. In line with most of the previous literature, FDI do not have significant effects on income inequalities, whereas trade, especially when occurs with developed countries, seems to be more relevant. Different results are found when we take into consideration the educational system which represents an important channel through which FDI and trade may affect inequality.     

Exports and FDI motivations: Empirical evidence from U.S. foreign subsidiaries

Foreign direct investments (FDI) are supposed to bring into the host countries indirect benefits, usually referred as productivity spillover effects. However, an emerging literature analyses the effect with regard to the export performance of local firms finding inconclusive results. This literature is affected by two main shortcomings: firstly, the role played by FDI motivations is largely disregarded and, secondly, it is difficult to generalise results valid across countries. For these reasons, the aim of the paper is that of testing the effects of U.S. FDI on export intensity at the sectoral level in 16 OECD countries over the period 1990–2001 by bringing together international economics and international business perspective on FDI motivations. Through our data, we disentangle asset seeking and asset exploiting FDI motivations distinguishing also the channels through which the effect is going to occur. The findings show that asset exploiting motivations, and in particular market seeking FDI, are those that affect export intensity to a greater extent.     

Efficiency in the factoring industry

The efficiency and productivity in the Italian factoring industry between 1993 and 1997 is investigated using DEA. The factoring industry is an important part of many financial systems and it has established itself as a major source of finance and credit management for a growing number of companies. However, as far as the authors are aware no studies have applied frontier methodologies to examine the efficiency and productivity of this industry. This paper focuses on the Italian market, the second largest in the world after the UK. The results suggest that there are substantial cost savings to be had in the Italian factoring industry: the mean cost inefficiency in the Italian factoring industry over the period 1993–1997 ranged between 14% and 22%. These inefficiencies are mainly generated by allocative rather than technical inefficiencies. Scale and technical inefficiencies seem to be similar in magnitude and the supposed importance of the latter typically found in the banking efficiency literature, are not observed in Italian factoring. Firm size does not appear to be related to technical, allocative and economic efficiency and the hypothesis that ownership structure influences factoring firm efficiency could not be rejected. In order to analyse efficiency change over time the Malmquist index is used. Total factor productivity was decomposed into technical change and efficiency change and the latter was further divided into pure efficiency and scale efficiency change. Productivity changes were slight over the period 1993–1996, while a substantial increase in productivity occurred between 1996 and 1997: the latter appears to be the result of a large improvement in the technology and a positive scale efficiency change, however, this was slowed down by a negative pure efficiency change.     

International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society Announcement of 1996 Meeting

International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society Announcement of 1996 Meeting