Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality

Medicaid is a government programme that also provides health insurance to the elderly who have few assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency, and we ask what other observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid. The data show that both singles and couples with high retirement income can end up on Medicaid at very advanced ages. We find that, conditioning on a large number of observable characteristics, including those that directly relate to Medicaid eligibility criteria, single women are more likely to end up on Medicaid – so are non‐white people, but, surprisingly, their higher recipiency is concentrated in the higher income percentiles. We also find that people with low incomes who have a high‐school diploma or higher degree are much less likely to end up receiving Medicaid than their less‐educated counterparts. All of these effects are large and depend on retirement income in a very non‐linear way.     

Globalization and knowledge spillover: international direct investment,exports and patents

In this study three possible determinants of the increase in the ratio between skilled and unskilled workers are tested together: R&D, organisational change, and foreign direct investment. After analysing the literature, these hypotheses are jointly tested using a SUR estimate. The results – regarding a panel of 488 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1989–1997 – suggest the statistical significance of the impact of organisational change, while they tend to exclude a direct relation between R&D spending and skill upgrading. With reference to FDIs, the nature of the data and the results do not permit the exclusion of their possible influence.     

The productivity impact of R&D investment: are high-tech sectors still ahead?

Our aim is to investigate the relationship between a firm's R&D expenditures and its productivity, looking at sectoral peculiarities. We use a unique longitudinal database consisting of 1809 US and European manufacturing and service firms over the period 1990–2008. Our main findings can be summarised as follows. Consistently with previous literature, the knowledge stock has a significant positive impact on a firm's productivity. More interestingly, the coefficient turns out to be significantly larger in the R&D-user services and high-tech manufacturing sectors than in the non-high-tech manufacturing sectors. Contrary to the ‘latecomer advantage’ approach, these outcomes suggest that firms in high-tech sectors are still ahead in terms of impact on productivity of R&D investments.     

Examining the Interaction between Saving and Contributions to Personal Pension Plans: Evidence from the BHPS*

This paper analyses the effects of social security reforms on saving in Britain. We use the British Household Panel Survey to investigate the interactions between voluntary additional contributions to personal pension plans (PPP) and saving in conventional forms. In particular, we test whether contributions to the PPP crowd out saving or constitute additional saving. Results suggest that not only have private pension schemes not crowded out private saving, but actually they have increased it too.     

Investor protection and value creation in cross‐border M&As by emerging economies

Previous research investigating cross‐border M&As (CBM&As) by emerging economies (EEs) provided contrasting evidence on the value enhancement role of investor protection rules. We conduct a new empirical study to address the issue with an accurate sample selection of bidders from more homogeneous developing countries and transactions on developed countries only. Our analysis over the 1997–2012 period on a sample of M&A deals by companies from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) does not provide evidence that better institutional standards in the destination country are rewarded by the local stock market. We find that foreign governance quality is not associated with positive excess stock returns around the announcement date. Rather, these returns are affected by firm‐specific and deal‐specific factors, such as the relative deal size, the listed status of the target company, and the acquirer size. Comparison with other studies on excess returns for emerging markets (including BRICs) suggests that the results could be driven at least partially by country choice.     

Does consumption respond to predicted increases in cash-hand availability?: Evidence from the Italian “severance pay”

We examine whether Italian household consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to “severance pay”, a sizable lump-sum that workers receive at job termination. We find no evidence of excess sensitivity of non-durable expenditure to this anticipated cash-in-hand change.     

Is demand-pulled innovation equally important in different groups of firms?

Previous empirical literature has tested the demand-pull hypothesisand found that innovation may be driven by output. Using a balancedpanel of 216 Italian manufacturing firms (1995–2000) andchecking for the path-dependent nature of R&D we find arole of sales in inducing R&D. However, the demand-pulleffect plays a varying role for different sub-samples of firms.Exporting firms, liquidity-constrained firms, unsubsidised firmsand those not heading a group seem to be sensitive to salesin deciding R&D. These results have been obtained usinga Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected Estimator, a recentpanel-data technique suitable for small samples.     

Young firms and innovation: A microeconometric analysis

This paper discusses the sources of product innovation in young innovative companies (YICs), here defined as firms engaged in product innovation and with less than 8 years of activity. In particular, we look at in-house and external R&D and at the acquisition of external technology in its embodied and disembodied components. These input–output relationships are tested on a sample of 2713 innovative Italian firms. A sample-selection approach is applied to study both the determinants of product innovation and the factors affecting the intensity of innovation.Results show that in-house R&D is linked to the propensity to introduce product innovation both in mature firms and YICs; however, innovation intensity in the YICs is mainly dependent on embodied technical change from external sources, while in-house R&D does not play a significant role.     

Knowledge misappropriation risks and contractual complexity in entrepreneurial ventures’ non-equity alliances

Small Business Economics - This paper explores the role of anticipated knowledge misappropriation risks in contract design in non-equity alliances involving high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. We...