Bank–firms topology in Italy

An empirical analysis of the Italian system of banks and firms is carried out using the network theory. The emerging architecture of this economic network shows peculiar behaviors: (i) Multiple lending is very widespread; (ii) Small firms are preferentially financed by small banks; (iii) Large firms are financed by many banks; (iv) the ratio between loans and deposits is much higher for large banks than for small banks, while (v) strong size heterogeneity appears among co-financing banks, and (vi) the spanning-tree is very hierarchical.     

Competitive balance and the participation–spectatorship gap in Chinese table tennis

Excessive competitive imbalance holds the potential to render teams and, by extension, leagues inviable. The China Table Tennis Super League has languished in its attempt to catch on as a popular spectator sport in spite of the sport’s popularity as recreational activity. One of the primary reasons for the participation–spectatorship gap cited by officials is competitive imbalance. This research estimates a number of within-season balance measures, including the standard deviation of winning, concentration ratio, and Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. The results show that both the men’s and women’s leagues have been relatively balanced over time. Implications regarding competitive balance and other league policy considerations are explored.     

Culture and the capital–performance nexus in dual banking systems

While recent surveys have taken a special interest in culture to explain the failure of existing regulation, empirical evidence on the role of culture in influencing the bank capital-performance link is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we ask the following: Should regulators and policy makers make room for culture as an effective tool for a successful bank regulatory environment? We identify three proxies for cultural values derived from Hofstede (1980, 2001) and the World Values Survey and investigate to what extent individualism, masculinity, and trust can enhance or impede the capital-performance link for conventional and Islamic banks. Analyzing a panel of 729 banks operating in 33 countries from 1999 to 2013, our findings provide empirical evidence that cultural values enhance the capital-performance link for the two bank types. Our results have important policy implications: our paper represents a first initiative and provides evidence that culture has merits and can be used as an additional tool to implement regulatory guidelines in a successful way.     

Real exchange rate and export performance in Argentina, 2002–2008

Between 2002 and 2008, Argentina experienced a phase of very high and sustained economic growth. During this period, macroeconomic policy aimed to preserve a stable and competitive real exchange rate (SCRER). There is controversy on whether the SCRER policy was a key factor fostering growth and, even more, on whether it helped promote the expansion of tradable activities and exports. We use a methodology to detect episodes of export surges among Argentina’s export industries and find that labor-intensive industries—especially low- and medium-technology manufactures—experienced the highest proportion of export surges within this period. We also find that between 1980 and 2015, the highest proportion of surges in total exports occurred during the 2003–8 period. The performance of export of services was also particularly dynamic during this period. This evidence suggests that the SCRER policy was instrumental for export surges in Argentina during 2002–8.     

Ownership and enterprise performance in the Russian oil industry, 1992–2012

This article examines enterprise performance in Russian oil companies between 1992 and 2012. The analysis is based upon longitudinal trend output data, and distinguishes between four different types of owners – outsider private, insider private, federal state and regional state. In comparison with previous studies which considered just 1999–2004, and identified outsider private companies as the best performers, this article finds that over the longer period 1992–2012 federal state and insider private-owned companies actually performed best. The explanation for this relates to institutions and the business environment.     

Connections and performance in bankers’ turnover

In this paper we study the impact of the connections of the top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) of Italian banks on their turnover and on bank performance. We measure managers’ connections by the kilometer distance between the province of the bank's headquarter and the manager's province of birth. We show that top managers tend to be local in the sense that the distribution of this distance is heavily skewed towards zero. On the basis of this evidence we investigate whether connections affect the duration of the appointment at the bank, and whether connections entrench managers at the expense of the bank's performance. We find that connections generally decrease the probability of bank manager’s turnover, and that the positive effect of performance on tenure is strongly attenuated once connections are taken into account. Furthermore we find that for any bank type performance does not increase with connections. On the contrary, we show that having connected managers hurts performance in Mutual, Cooperative and Rural banks. Overall these findings suggest that connections are collusion devices to share and maintain rents at the expenses of bank performance.     

Study on Substantive Derivative Tools for Commercial Bank to Control the Fund Gap

Fund gap control, as an important and major managerial technique, has been widely used in western commercial banks （CBs）. Good management on fund gap can not only avoid interest rate （IR） risk, but also bring benefits to CBs. This paper discusses three substantive derivative tools that can be used to control fund gap, that is, interest rate futures, interest rate options and interest rate swap.     

Ex post participation constraint in a principal–agent model with adverse selection and moral hazard

This paper analyzes optimal contracting when an agent has private information before contracting and exerts hidden effort that stochastically affects the output. Additionally, the contract is constrained to satisfy the agentʼs ex post participation. We highlight three features of this model. First, the agent faces countervailing incentives. Second, the separation of types is never optimal. Third, the optimal constant bonus rewarding success is distorted downward below its efficient level.     

The effect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on child labor and school attendance in the West Bank

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on child labor and school attendance of Palestinian children in the West Bank between the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000) and the end of 2006. In particular, we investigate the effects, on children' s status, of number of days Israel closed its border with Palestinian Territories. We find that an increase in the number of closure days increases child labor while it (weakly) reduces school attendance in the West Bank. We provide evidence on different mechanisms that possibly account for these results.     

The World Bank and Emerging Powers: Beyond the Multipolarity–Multilateralism Conundrum

The discrepancy between the increasingly multipolar world economy of the recent decades and the stubbornly limited representativeness of the organisations mandated with its governance causes much strain in global politics. Some scholars suggest that this chronic mismatch will undermine existing multilateral bodies, while others expect the present architecture to persist. This article contends that the outcomes of this challenge are institution-specific. In settings where significant operational realignments are possible within existing mandates and governance structures, the multipolarity–multilateralism conundrum could be partly mitigated. The argument is based on a thematic analysis of all IBRD-IDA loan commitments between 2002 and 2015 in the World Bank’s seven all-time top borrowers: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey (collectively, the Big Seven). The key finding is that while these emerging countries remain the Bank’s biggest clients, the terms of their engagement have shifted precisely along the lines where they had already differed from the rest of the Bank’s clientele: away from politically onerous governance and institutional reforms, and towards developing physical and market infrastructure while attaining social sustainability. This implicit realignment is facilitated by the Bank’s diverse policy repertoire, which allows considerable inter-regional and intra-regional variation in lending patterns to accommodate member preferences.     

Customer participation in the service encounter

This paper considers the role of service customers in those service encounters where the customer participates in the service production and delivery process, and the customer factors, motivations and incentive mechanism to participate in service delivery are analyzed. This study explores the relationship between service quality and service customer participation in the service encounter and the effect of customer participation on service providers＇ job stress. Finally, the management implications about customer participation in the service encounter from the findings are discussed.     

Discouraged workers in developed countries and added workers in developing countries? Unemployment rate and labour force participation

Changes in the unemployment rate can have differing impacts on the labour force participation rate depending on the strength of the added worker effect and the discouraged worker effect. This paper documents the differences in the relationship between the unemployment rate and the labour force participation rate across a panel of developing countries and OECD countries. We employ a system GMM approach to control for and to establish the bi-directional causality between unemployment and labour force participation. We find that the discouraged worker effect does dominate in developed countries, while dominance of the added worker effect in developing countries leads to an increase in labour force in the face of rising unemployment.     

On the joint effect of technological and management innovations on performance: increasing or diminishing returns?

Most studies on innovation are aimed at covering technological innovation, neglecting other modes of innovation based on non-technological drivers. The latter, referred to as management innovation, consists of the implementation of new management practices, processes or organisational tasks. This work advances knowledge on the topic by exploring the joint effect of simultaneously introducing technological and management innovations on performance. Based on an analysis of 12,563 Spanish firms drawn from CIS data, our findings suggest that firms frequently pursue the simultaneous or joint introduction of both technological and management innovations and that integration impacts positively on a firm’s performance, evidencing an inverted U-shape that suggest positive but diminishing returns. A theoretical framework using the capability-based view embraces the emerging conversation on management innovation issues and its relationship with the well-researched technological one.     

R&;D spillovers and firms’ performance in Italy

Using a translog production function we estimate the impact of R&D spillovers on the output performance of Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1998-2003. Technological flows are measured through an asymmetric similarity index that takes also into account the geographical proximity of firms. Results show that R&D spillovers positively affect firms production and that geography matters in determining the role of the external technology. Moreover, we find that the effect of R&D spillovers is high in the Centre-South of Italy and that the stock of R&D spillovers is Morishima complement to the stock of R&D own-capital. The authors thank Giovanni Anania, Olof Ejermo, Vincenzo Scoppa, Alessandro Sterlacchini and Marco Vivarelli for useful comments on an earlier draft. We are also grateful to the participants at the Workshop on “Spatial Econometrics and Statistics” in Rome (University “Guido Carli, May 2006) and at the 2006 ADRES Conference, “Networks of Innovation and Spatial Analysis of Knowledge Diffusion” in St Etienne for helpful discussion and to an anonymous referee for many detailed and constructive comments on an earlier version. All remaining errors and omissions are our own. Financial support received by MIUR is gratefully acknowledged.     

Development and performance of Russian agricultural enterprises, 1990–2001

This article presents an overview of the development of Russian agricultural enterprises in 1990–2001. The multi‐layered structure of agriculture represented by different categories of non‐commercial and commercial producers requires a clear distinction of policies with respect to their targets and end results. The agricultural enterprises maintained their leading role in marketed agricultural production and represent the main focus group among the agricultural producers for policy makers. The article reviews organisational and structural changes to these enterprises in the period studied, and their economic and financial performance. It also examines current policies for resolving the problems in agriculture.     

Trade liberalization and Firms’ export performance in China: Theory and evidence

The focus of the literature surrounding trade liberalization has recently shifted from trade liberalization in imported final goods to studying the effects of trade liberalization in imported intermediate inputs. This emphasis fits very well the trade liberalization experience of China following its accession to the WTO in 2001. In this paper, we build a multi-sector heterogenous-firm model with trade in both intermediate goods and final goods, and we ask: How do final-goods producers respond to trade liberalization in imported inputs? Do they respond differently across sectors? How do firms respond differently to trade liberalization in imported-outputs instead? We separate the total effect of trade liberalization into those caused by inter-sectoral resource allocation (IRA) and by within-sector selection of firms according to productivity (which we call Melitz selection effect). It is the IRA effect that gives rise to differential impacts of trade liberalization in different sectors. These impacts include changes in the probability of entry into the export market, the fraction of firms that export and the share of export revenue. To test our hypotheses, we carry out both quantitative analysis and empirical analysis by using Chinese firm-level data. The results are consistent with our theoretical predictions.     

Firm adaptiveness and performance heterogeneity: the case of sales–advertising dynamics in an evolving product market

We combine evolutionary theory concepts and multivariate persistence methodology to develop and test expectations about the adaptiveness of firm decisions and its implications for performance heterogeneity. We focus on the relatively reversible advertising decisions in an evolving product market, domains typically ignored by evolutionary research. We find that an adaptive decision routine helps an incumbent firm maintain its advantages and overcome the challenge posed by a major competitive entry.

Communication in dynastic repeated games: ‘Whitewashes’ and ‘coverups’

Summary. We ask whether communication can directly substitute for memory in dynastic repeated games in which short lived individuals care about the utility of their offspring who replace them in an infinitely repeated game. Each individual is unable to observe what happens before his entry in the game. Past information is therefore conveyed from one cohort to the next by means of communication.When communication is costless and messages are sent simultaneously, communication mechanisms or protocols exist that sustain the same set of equilibrium payoffs as in the standard repeated game. When communication is costless but sequential, the incentives to whitewash the unobservable past history of play become pervasive. These incentives to whitewash can only be countered if some player serves as a neutral historian who verifies the truthfulness of others reports while remaining indifferent in the process. By contrast, when communication is sequential and (lexicographically) costly, all protocols admit only equilibria that sustain stage Nash equilibrium payoffs.We also analyze a centralized communication protocol in which history leaves a footprint that can only hidden by the current cohort by a unanimous coverup. We show that in this case the set of payoffs that are sustainable in equilibrium coincides with the weakly renegotiation proof payoffs of the standard repeated game.Received: 30 September 2002, Revised: 5 August 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, C73, D82.We wish to thank an Associate Editor and Dino Gerardi as well as seminar participants at Arizona State, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Indiana, Montreal, Princeton, Rochester, Vanderbilt, VPI, the 2001 NSF/NBER Decentralization Conference, the Summer 2001 North American Econometric Society Meetings, and the Midwest Theory Conference, 2000, for useful comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.     

What's in a second opinion? Shadowing the ECB and the Bank of England

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation in advance of the central bank announcement. In this paper, we systematically evaluate this second opinion and find that, first, the shadow committee of the ECB tends to be relatively less inflation averse than the ECB. In contrast, the shadow committee of the BoE proposes a more hawkish monetary policy stance than the BoE. Second, consensus within a shadow committee is far easier to reach when there is no pressure to change the policy rate. Third, the ECB's shadow committee is more activist than the ECB's Governing Council and a larger degree of consensus within the former brings about a greater likelihood that the two committees will agree.