Pensions reforms,workforce ageing and firm-provided welfare

This paper investigates the impact of an exogenous increase in the legal retirement age on the firms’ propensity to provide welfare services voluntarily to their employees. To this purpose we exploit a unique information derived from the Rilevazione su Imprese e Lavoro (RIL), a survey conducted in 2015 on a large and representative sample of Italian firms. Applying different regression models we show that firms which were forced to give up previously planned hirings because of the Law 201/2011 (the so-called ‘Fornero pension reform’), increased the probability of providing welfare services at workplace. By referring to the sociological, human resource management and economic literature we then argue that a sudden increase in the legal retirement age may motivate the employers to establish welfare schemes as a way to cope with an ageing workforce. Our findings also hold when propensity score matching methods are used in order to control for sample selection issues.     

Product quality, lender liability, and consumer credit

Under ‘linked credit’ (also known as ‘connectedlending’), the buyer obtains a loan from a lender withthe specific purpose of purchasing a certain product. Creditis arranged directly by the seller, who acts as an intermediaryfor the finance company. Within this form of financing, thelender often accepts a measure of liability for defective products.We show that ‘connected-lender liability’ can workas a signalling device for the reliability of sellers, so asto alleviate the market failure that arises when sellers arebetter informed than consumers about the quality of their products.     

Efficiency and total factor productivity change of Malaysian commercial banks

This paper analyses the efficiency of Malaysian commercial banks between 1996 and 2002 and finds that while the East Asian financial crisis caused a short-term increase in efficiency in 1998 primarily due to cost-cutting, increases in non-performing loans after the crisis caused a more sustained decline in bank efficiency. It is also found that mergers, fully Islamic banks, and conventional banks operating Islamic banking windows are all associated with lower efficiency. The paper estimates suggest mild decreasing returns to scale, and an average productivity change of 2.37% that is primarily attributable to technical change, which has nonetheless declined over time. Finally, while Islamic banks have been moderately successful in developing new products and technologies, the results suggest that the potential for Islamic banks to overcome their relative inefficiency is limited.     

Disability in Italian households: income,poverty and labour market participation

This article studies the economic effects of disabled members on Italian households, with the aim of identifying a suitable target group for welfare policies. Survey of Households Income and Wealth data for the year 2000 is used. Preliminary results show significant differences in levels of income and poverty diffusion to the detriment of households with disabled members. We propose an exogenous explanation: the replacement ratio between disability benefits and expected labour income shows that disability benefits do not compensate the potential incomes of the disabled person and of the possible carer, except in households with severe socioeconomic disadvantages. We also propose an endogenous explanation: applying a logit model we show that the labour market participation of the possible carer is reduced in households with disabled persons. In order to increase the income of the households with disabled members, policy recommendations include the provision of care services and structural policies to improve employment, income and educational opportunities for households at greatest disadvantage.     

INTER AND INTRA FIRM DIFFUSION OF ICT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM (UK) AND SWITZERLAND (CH) AN INTERNATIONALLY COMPARATIVE STUDY BASED ON FIRM-LEVEL DATA

This paper examines the effect of participation in government-sponsored R&;D consortia on the R&;D productivity of firms in the case of robot technology in Japan. We attempt to provide a new empirical analysis and discussions on the issue of government project evaluation by investigating the impact of the evolution of government programs, and to compare government-sponsored R&;D consortia with collaborative R&;D among firms. Using indicators of the quality of patents, which enables us to provide an estimation of quality-adjusted research productivity, we find that participation in government programs has a positive impact on the research productivity of participating firms. Moreover, the impact of participation became much higher after the design of government programs in this field changed in the late 1990s. Also, we find that participation in government-sponsored consortia has a greater impact on research productivity than participation in collaborative R&;D among firms. This may support government involvement in R&;D as a coordinator of R&;D collaboration.     

Intra-Industry Gaps in Technology and Investments in Technological Capabilities: Firm-level evidence from Chile

This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyse intra-industry gaps in technology, and tests it with enterprise-level data from a developing country. Following neoclassical theory, the existence of inter-firm technological gaps is explained by factor market segmentation that determines different factor prices and therefore different firms' technological choices. However, intra-industry gaps in technology may also result from the nature of the process of technological development, and from the different level of investments in technological capabilities.The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 338 industrial enterprises from Chile, and shows that it is possible to define technological thresholds, characterised by significant shifts in technology, independently of factor market segmentation. The analysis focuses on five major sectors: food processing, textile and garments, woodworking, metalworking and paper. Firms with different levels of technological complexity coexist within the same industry, and differences in technology are discrete, with different clusters sharing similar characteristics within the same industry. These results also have important policy implications for industrial development, which are drawn in a final section.     

Monetary policy through the ‘credit-cost channel’: Italy and Germany pre- and post-EMU

We present an empirical analysis of the ‘Credit-Cost Channel’ (CCC) of monetary policy transmission. This channel combines bank credit supply and interest rates on loans as a cost to firms. The thrust of the CCC is that it makes both aggregate demand and aggregate supply dependent on monetary policy. As a consequence (1) credit market conditions (e.g. risk spreads) are important sources and indicators of macroeconomic shocks, (2) the real effects of monetary policy are larger and persistent. We have applied the Cointegrated Vector Autoregression (CVAR) econometric methodology to Italy and Germany in the ‘hard’ EMS period and in the European Monetary Union (EMU) period. The short-run and long-run effects of the CCC are detectable for both countries in both periods. Simulation of the estimated model also confirms that inflation-targeting by way of inter-bank rate control stabilizes inflation through structural shifts of the stochastic equilibrium paths of both inflation and the output.     

Efficiency in Islamic and conventional banking: an international comparison

The paper investigates the efficiency of a sample of Islamic and conventional banks in 10 countries that operate Islamic banking for the period 1996–2002, using an output distance function approach. We obtain measures of efficiency after allowing for environmental influences such as country macroeconomic conditions, accessibility of banking services and bank type. While these factors are assumed to directly influence the shape of the technology, we assume that country dummies and bank size directly influence technical inefficiency. The parameter estimates highlight that during the sample period, Islamic banking appears to be associated with higher input usage. Furthermore, by allowing for bank size and international differences in the underlying inefficiency distributions, we are also able to demonstrate statistically significant differences in inefficiency related to these factors even after controlling for specific environmental characteristics and Islamic banking. Thus, for example, our results suggest that Sudan and Yemen have relatively higher inefficiency while Bahrain and Bangladesh have lower estimated inefficiency. Except for Sudan, where banks exhibits relatively strong returns to scale, most sample banks exhibit very slight returns to scale, although Islamic banks are found to have moderately higher returns to scale than conventional banks. While this suggests that Islamic banks may benefit from increased scale, we would emphasize that our results suggest that identifying and overcoming the factors that cause Islamic banks to have relatively low potential outputs for given input usage levels will be the key challenge for Islamic banking in the coming decades.     

Probabilità qualitative non archimedee e realizzabilità

Si approfondiscono gli aspetti teorici della costruzione delle probabilità qualitative qualora si desideri mantenere distinto l'evento impossibile da altri eventi. La probabilità qualitativa può essere poi rappresentata numericamente come probabilità condizionata.