Local banking and local economic growth in Italy: some panel evidence

This article provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level – the Italian ‘province’) in Italy. A comprehensive data set is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of local infrastructures and the production structure of the local economy. A linear within-estimator technique with fixed effects is applied to a modified version of the so-called Barro regression in order to address the well-known econometric issues of reverse causality and estimation bias resulting from unobserved district-specific influences.     

Renato Giannetti and Michelangelo Vasta. L'impresa italiana nel Novecento. Bologna, Italy: Societa Editrice il Mulino, 2003. 486 pp. ISBN 88-15-09496-2, {euro}30.00.

Italian business history is not well known abroad. This is quiteobvious. Even though Italy has been industrialized since the1920s, it is a small country, with little international influence.Its historical patterns of evolution privileged the internalmarket, and although its domestic corporations have traditionallynot been very active abroad, foreign firms have also manifestedopenly their reluctance to invest in a promising but too turbulentenvironment. As a result, Italian business history has fromthe beginning been a domestic story, scarcely appealing forforeign scholars. The Italian historiographic climate was partiallyresponsible for this situation. Business history as a disciplinehas only recently been "legitimized" in Italy (still there areno chairs in the field). For a long time, the     

National Determinants of Family Firm Development? Family Firms in Britain, Spain, and Italy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

We provide here a complement to recent work on family business,which has demonstrated the need to go beyond the generic definitionof the family firm to place personal capitalism in an appropriateinstitutional, historical, and cultural framework. By focusingon the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences in Britain,Spain, and Italy, we challenge the notion that in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries there was anything so simple as a Mediterraneanmodel for family business. Rather, we demonstrate the need toconsider family businesses in national and regional contextsif we are to understand their various capabilities and characteristics.We use similarities and differences in the experiences and responsesof families and firms in the three countries to support thisclaim.     

Large and entangled: Italian business groups in the long run

This article, by using both a qualitative and quantitative approach, focuses on large business groups (BGs) in Italy. It provides a methodology of analysis which aims at re-constructing the boundaries and the relevance of BGs in a national economy in the long-run, identifying a country-specific taxonomy of both their forms and the rationales (logics) for their existence. By adopting an original methodology, that is the network analysis, and by using a large and comprehensive dataset (Imita.db), this article also provides some proxy measures of the relevance of the largest BGs in the Italian economy, something which has never been done before in Italian business history research. The analysis clearly shows the persistence of large and entangled BGs in the Italian economy. It confirms that this particular form of business organisation is neither limited to the less developed countries, nor is simply a second best functional substitute of the multi-divisional form diffused in the liberal market economies. Finally, this article also suggests a research itinerary which can also be fruitfully applied in business history to other specific cases.     

风险与回报：银行业中的数学（下）

Ⅲ风险管理与回报中的数学我已指出,我们必须管理种类广泛的风险。风险可以用价格,也就是,借债或放贷的利率,买进或卖出外汇的汇率,来陈述。风险还可用本金来表述,比如,我们资产的价值(也就是本金)会随利率、商业周期、我们客户的信誉等因素的变动而变化。每一种风险要用不同的风险管理技术去处置;而且每一种风险,包括涉及流动性及时兑现能力、利率、收益曲线、货币、信贷、预先付款、甚至国家主权等的风险,统统都能作为产品在市场上交易。在这种环境下,我们的赢利能力,对我们的风险管理究竟多么有效的依赖,与对我们的产品究竟有多大盈利