Financing obstacles and growth: an analysis for euro area non-financial firms

This paper investigates the determinants of financing obstacles (FOs) and their impact on firm growth. For this purpose, we rely on both balance sheet data and survey data for a sample of non-financial firms in the euro area. The latter allows us to devise a direct measure of the firms’ probability of facing FOs. First, our results indicate that FOs are linked to characteristics such as the age of the firm, its size, its sales level or the sector in which it operates. Second, we find that, though based on few variables, our measure of FOs appears to be relevant in explaining firm growth in four out of the five countries considered; likewise, growth is found to be positively linked to cash flow.     

Straight to the Core — Explaining Union Responses to the Casualization of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for Agency Workers

The existing literature provides different accounts on the strategies of unions regarding marginal workers. It has been argued that under increasing labour market segmentation, unions have either to prioritize their core constituencies and to seek compromises with management, or to adopt inclusive strategies towards peripheral workers to counterbalance eroding bargaining power. This article shows that both strategies represent equally viable options to protect the interests of unions' core members. The strategic choice depends on the (perceived) competition between core and peripheral employees related to employers' personnel strategies; this affects the possible alignment of interests between unions' core members, on the one hand, and either management or peripheral employees, on the other. Our historical analysis of union strategies towards agency workers in the German metal sector illustrates this mechanism, and identifies institutional change towards liberalization as the trigger for aggressive segmentation strategies by employers and for inclusive union strategies.     

Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated.     

Taking Actively Advantage of MNCs’ Presence

In this paper, not only do we posit that the presence of a multinational corporation may entail significant benefits for the host economy and local firms’ performance, but also that these benefits can be actively sought and dynamically reinforced by local firms through the development of intense, embedded customer–supplier relationships. Building on the relational view, we argue that this may happen through the commitment of resources to relation-specific investments. Our hypotheses find support in a sample of SMEs suppliers of ST Microelectronics, the fourth largest producer of microelectronic components in the world. We show that by making relation-specific investments, local firms can grow quantitatively and qualitatively, improve their innovativeness, and acquire new clients.     

Mexico in the 1990s: The Main Cross-Sectional Facts

This paper describes the main cross-sectional facts on individual and household earnings, labor supply, income, consumption and wealth in Mexico in the decade of the 1990s. We use two different data sources: the Mexican Employment Survey (ENEU) and the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we integrate the two surveys to provide a complete characterization of the changes in employment, wages, income, consumption and wealth in the 1990s. Second, we highlight some distinctive features that characterize the Mexican economy in this decade. In particular, we focus on the changes in the size of the informal sector and we study the relationship between changes in informality and changes in wage inequality.     

Changing the way the elderly live: Evidence from the home health care market in the United States

I examine how decreases in government coverage of home health care visits to the elderly in the United States have affected their living arrangements. Specifically, I exploit geographic variation in the Medicare Home Health Care reimbursement rate that arose as a result of legislation passed in 1997 and I identify its impact on the living arrangements of older Medicare beneficiaries. I find that less generous reimbursement policies lead to a greater fraction of elderly giving up independent living. Baseline-model estimates suggest that a decline in reimbursement of one visit per user leads to a 0.98% increase in the fraction of elderly Medicare beneficiaries living in shared living arrangements, that is, living with somebody else, rather than alone or with only the spouse. This estimate implies that a decline in reimbursement of 5.1 visits per Medicare beneficiary increases the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements by 1.12 percentage points. Such an increase is consistent with the time-series increase in the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements between 1997 and 2000.     

Turbulence underneath the big calm? The micro-evidence behind Italian productivity dynamics

Italy ranked last in terms of manufacturing productivity growth according to OECD estimates over the last decade, with a flat, if not declining, trend. In this work we investigate the underlying firm-level dynamics of enterprises on the basis of a database developed by the Italian Statistical Office (ISTAT) covering the period 1989?C2004 and containing information on more than 100,000 firms. Over this period not only have the indicators of the central tendency of the distribution of labor productivity not significantly changed, but also the whole sectoral distributions have remained relatively stable over time, with their support at least not shrinking, or even possibly widening, over time. This is even more surprising if one takes into consideration the ??Euro?? shock that occurred during the period investigated. On the contrary, we observe that inter-decile differences in productivity have been increasing. Further, heterogeneous firms?? characteristics (i.e. export activity and innovation) seem to have contributed to boosting such intra-industry differences. Given such wide heterogeneities we resort to quantile regressions to identify the impact of a set of regressors at different levels of the conditional distribution of labor productivity. One phenomenon that we observe is what we call a tendency toward ??neo-dualism?? involving the co-existence of a small group of dynamic firms with a bigger ensemble of much less technologically progressive ones.     

Trends and Drivers in CSR Disclosure: A Focus on Reporting Practices in the Automotive Industry

This work focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure practices of multinational corporations. Based on a longitudinal study of CSR reports of companies operating in the automotive industry, the paper offers a detailed study of how disclosure practices are changing and which principles and approaches influence and drive the development of such disclosure. Based on a four-year report-based study, the findings enable us to identify three main trends in the CSR disclosure strategy of automotive firms. First, in line with the mainstream CSR literature, the present study confirms the trend towards the increasing environmental and social accountability. Second, it adds evidence to the emerging debate regarding the harmonization and standardization of reporting and discusses this aspect by mentioning the standards as exerting some normative pressures within the sector. Finally, it provides evidence on specific links emerging between issues and actors. The implications of this evidence contribute to opening up the debate on CSR disclosure to the possibility of combining the institutional lens with a strategic approach that captures the materiality considerations of CSR disclosure.     

Private-Law Instruments for Reduction of Risks on International Financial Markets: Results and Limits of Self-Regulation

International financial markets are characterized by self-regulation among private parties and international action in the regulation of such behavior. The Group of Seven plan, the World Trade Organization Agreements, the General Agreement on Trade in Services principles, and European Union Community Law provide a minimum standard of derivative transactions with the aim of reducing the risks related to those products. Codes of best practice are a source of regulation at an international level, but their effectiveness depends on their acceptance by the business firms operating in the markets. The role of self-regulation is very important; it can prevent and manage risk in an optimal way, under the condition of a harmonized international law. Public law has to manage the externalities that arise from private transactions, and private regulation has to make the rest.     

Gender inequalities in ownership and control of land in Africa: myth and reality

Lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and men. This article sets out to explore, conceptually and empirically, the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in African countries. The first section of the article engages in a conceptual discussion of how to measure gendered‐land outcomes, what ownership and control mean in different contexts, and why attention to these factors is important for the development of gender and land statistics. The second section of the article systematically reviews existing evidence from microlevel large sample studies to summarize recent trends in land access, ownership, and control by sex. The third section presents new statistics from a variety of nationally representative and large‐scale unpublished data on gender and land in Africa. Results provide not only a nuanced understanding of the importance of measuring land indicators for gendered development in Africa and globally but also new statistics on a variety of land outcomes to aid stakeholders in the discussion of gender‐land inequalities.