Opening and linking up: firms,GVCs, and productivity in Latin America

This work explores the relationship between exports, global value chains (GVCs)’ participation and position, and firms’ productivity. To this aim, we combine the most recent World Bank Enterprise Survey in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and World Trade Organization trade in value-added data. To explore the above relationship, we adopt an extended version of the standard Cobb-Douglas output function including indicators of export performance and GVCs. We control for heterogeneity among firms (by country, region, and industry), sample selection, firms’ characteristics, and reverse causality. Our empirical outcomes confirm the presence of a positive relationship between participation in international activities and firm performance. They also show that both participation in GVCs and position within GVCs matter. These findings have strong policy implications and may help policymakers in choosing the best policy options to enhance the link between GVCs’ integration and firms’ productivity.     

An integrated approach to supply chain risk analysis

Despite the increasing attention that supply chain risk management is receiving by both researchers and practitioners, companies still lack a risk culture. Moreover, risk management approaches are either too general or require pieces of information not regularly recorded by organisations. This work develops a risk identification and analysis methodology that integrates widely adopted supply chain and risk management tools. In particular, process analysis is performed by means of the standard framework provided by the Supply Chain Operations Reference Model, the risk identification and analysis tasks are accomplished by applying the Risk Breakdown Structure and the Risk Breakdown Matrix, and the effects of risk occurrence on activities are assessed by indicators that are already measured by companies in order to monitor their performances. In such a way, the framework contributes to increase companies’ awareness and communication about risk, which are essential components of the management of modern supply chains. A base case has been developed by applying the proposed approach to a hypothetical manufacturing supply chain. An in-depth validation will be carried out to improve the methodology and further demonstrate its benefits and limitations. Future research will extend the framework to include the understanding of the multiple effects of risky events on different processes.     

Political pressures and the credibility of regulation: can profit sharing mitigate regulatory risk?

When price-cap rules determine the structure of prices for a long period, they suffer a credibility problem and introduce an element of risk especially if a firm’s profits are “too large”. Profit sharing may be seen as a device to pre-determine price adjustments and thus to decrease regulatory risk. We analyse the effects of profit sharing on the incentives to invest, using a real option approach. Absent credibility issues, a well designed profit sharing system may be neutral relative to a pure price cap. With regulatory risk, profit sharing is preferable to a pure price-cap one, if it intervenes for high enough profit levels.

On the Relative Optimality of Environmental Policy Instruments: An Application of the Work of Alberto Alesina

We study the issue of optimality of policies devoted to environmental goals, building upon the recent and interesting work by Alesina and Passarelli (2010) and extending their analysis to the more general framework set up by Weitzman (The Review of Economic Studies 41: 477-491, 1974). We illustrate instruments that governments have at their disposal to reduce polluting emissions, and we point out the economic implications that may arise from the overlapping regulation through both instruments in the European context. We review the literature on political determination of environmental regulation. On the basis of existing literature, we show that political factors are more important than economic ones in explaining why particular instruments are implemented for certain problems (Hepburn et al. Climate Policy 6: 137–160, 2006). We recognize Alesina’s contribution which states that environmental policy, and the decision to adopt one tool instead of another, is subject to a complex political process. Governments are subject to pressure from politicians, households, and firms because their decisions imply winners and losers. Then, we focus in detail on the work by Alesina and Passarelli (2010) who consider which policy tool and at what level would be chosen by majority voting to reduce polluting emissions; they find out that even if a tax is in general superior to quantity based mechanisms (quotas and tradable permits), the majority may strategically choose a quantity mode in order to charge the minority a larger share of the cost for polluting emissions reduction. We extend Alesina’s analysis, focusing on the optimality of price-based mechanisms, since it is not always the case that price instruments are more efficient than quantity instruments. To this aim, we explicitly make use of Weitzman results (The Review of Economic Studies 41: 477–491, 1974), which suggest that if costs are highly nonlinear compared to benefits, then price-type regulation is more efficient, while if costs are close to linear, then quantity-type regulation is more efficient. We cast Alesina’s analysis in the European context, analyzing potential voting outcomes, assuming that EU countries can be arranged according to different criteria. We find that depending on the empirical distribution of voting countries, Alesina’s voting procedure leads to interesting different outcomes.     

The Role of Comprehensive Income as Financial Performance Predictor： Panel Evidence From Italy

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the comprehensive income （CI） and its individual components are useful in assessing the future cash flows for Italian listed companies. In addition, we verify whether the recent requirement of International Accounting Standard （IAS） 1 （r2011） of providing the other comprehensive income （OCI） separates in two sub-totals （recycling and non-recycling items groups） is useful to explain the expected cash flows. We consider a sample of 121 Italian non-financial companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange for the testing period of 2008-2011, employing a fixed-effect regression model, and we test the relationship between the changes in the variables considered and not the relative absolute value reducing, in this way, the risk of not grasping a report if the independent variable and the response variable do not have the same sign. Our results stress that CI and the two new sub-aggregates are not relevant to explain future cash flows, while net income （NI） and OC1 as a whole seem to be more relevant to make explicit the future financial position. The study contributes, as a sort of post-implementation review, to the current debate on the ability of Cl to predict the future cash flows and on the real usefulness of the CI and the sub-aggregate identified by the IAS 1 revised as well.     

Employees' concerns about change and commitment to change among Italian organizations: the moderating role of innovative work behavior

Despite being regarded as a critical psychological process influencing the effectiveness of change initiatives, concerns about change have not received empirical attention in the organizational change literature. The present study addresses this issue by examining the relationships among employees' concerns about change (conceptualized as including concerns about the contents and benefits of change, and concerns about mastering the change), commitment to change and innovative work behavior. First, in a hospital undergoing a major administrative change (N = 435), concerns about change were generally found to be negatively related to affective and normative commitment to change and positively related to continuance commitment to change. These results were replicated in a chemical and pharmaceutical company undergoing a technological change (N = 113), except that concerns about change were unrelated to normative commitment to change. In addition, employees' innovative work behavior moderated the relationship of concerns about change to affective commitment to change such that the relationship was negative when innovative behavior was low but nonsignificant when innovative behavior was high. This study provides scholars and practitioners with a theoretically and empirically grounded framework for assessing employees' concerns about change, and moves research a step forward into identifying the behaviors that organizations should support to counteract this psychological threat.     

Orientation to sustainability and strategic positioning of destinations: an analysis of international tourism websites

The communication that Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) address to destination stakeholders plays a central role in attracting attention and resources for sustainable destination development and disclosing the efforts made to be a sustainable territory. There has been extensive analysis on the role of official tourism websites that addresses both DMO's internal and external stakeholders. However, less exploration is available on the relationship between the contents disclosed through tourism websites and the strategic positioning of the destination. This study empirically examines that link with a focus on ‘green/sustainable/responsible' travel. Results show a positive association between the orientation to sustainability in online communication and both sustainable regulation of the tourism sector and tourism development. In contrast, there is no significant association with destination size, tourism maturity and pricing policies.     

The Gendered Nature of Poverty in the EU: Individualized versus Collective Poverty Measures

Due to the adoption of the household as a unit of analysis, researchers have failed to identify accurate measures of women's income poverty. This study proposes an individualized measure of European poverty to highlight gender differences in the economic crisis. Employing data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the period 2007–12, it compares the household-based at-risk-of-poverty rate (ARPR) and the individualized financial dependency rate (FDR). The study shows that the gender gap in poverty in Europe is considerably higher when computed through FDR. Indeed, since the ARPR constitutes a proxy of the household's average conditions, it levels down gender inequalities within the household and also variations in individuals’ incomes over time. Only more detailed data collection on intrahousehold resource sharing will possibly allow the development of more precise and realistic indicators of women's and men's risks of poverty and financial dependency.     

ON THE PRICE EFFECTS OF HORIZONTAL MERGERS: A THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION

Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex‐post evidence, however, suggests that these effects do not always take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects. The analysis of mergers in the context of non‐localized spatial competition may offer a further interpretation to the ones proposed in the literature: in this framework both positive and zero price effects are possible outcomes of the merger activity.