Organizing professionals and their impact on performance: the case of public health doctors in the Italian SSN

ABSTRACT

Hybrid professional managers have been associated with improvements in the performance of public sector organizations. However, less attention has been given to differences within this category. Drawing on board human capital theory, we focus on an emerging group of ‘organizing professionals’ with earlier and deeper exposure to management training and education: generalist clinical hybrids drawn from public health in the Italian healthcare system. Specifically, we investigate the impact that these hybrid hospital CEOs have on organizational performance in comparison with other backgrounds. The results indicate that this form of generalist hybrid professionalism has distinct, if not dramatic, consequences for performance.     

International migration and trade agreements: The new role of PTAs

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and bilateral migration flows. Building on the empirical literature on the determinants of migration flows, I estimate a modified gravity model to assess the role of PTAs and their content on bilateral migration flows. Using a sample of 29 OECD destination countries over the period 1998–2008, I show a strong positive effect of PTAs on bilateral migration flows. I find that the content of PTAs also matters: when visa‐and‐asylum and labour market related provisions are included in PTAs, this further stimulates bilateral migration flows. Different estimation strategies, including instrumental variables, are employed to address the potential endogeneity bias problems related to PTAs and their content.     

Trust and trustworthiness after a land restitution program: lab-in-the-field evidence from Colombia

Constitutional Political Economy - We assess the impact on trust and trustworthiness of a governmental program to compensate victims of forced displacement. All our subjects were eligible to apply...     

Regional Differentiation and Farm Exit: A Hierarchical Model for Tuscany

We analyse the exit behaviour of Tuscan farms during the period 2000–2007 both at the farm and the territorial level. The study combines data from the 2000 National Census of Agriculture and three waves of the ‘Farm Structure Surveys’. The exit probability of the resulting sample, composed of 3,187 farms, is estimated through a Bayesian hierarchical probit model. Our results show that exits reflect the size and type of holdings. Likelihood of exit is higher in areas of higher population density that are not classified as ‘urban’ areas.     

Analytical pricing of discretely monitored Asian-style options: Theory and application to commodity markets

We compute an analytical expression for the moment generating function of the joint random vector consisting of a spot price and its discretely monitored average for a large class of square-root price dynamics. This result, combined with the Fourier transform pricing method proposed by Carr and Madan [Carr, P., Madan D., 1999. Option valuation using the fast Fourier transform. Journal of Computational Finance 2(4), Summer, 61–73] allows us to derive a closed-form formula for the fair value of discretely monitored Asian-style options. Our analysis encompasses the case of commodity price dynamics displaying mean reversion and jointly fitting a quoted futures curve and the seasonal structure of spot price volatility. Four tests are conducted to assess the relative performance of the pricing procedure stemming from our formulae. Empirical results based on natural gas data from NYMEX and corn data from CBOT show a remarkable improvement over the main alternative techniques developed for pricing Asian-style options within the market standard framework of geometric Brownian motion.     

Virtual currencies: different schemes and research opportunities

Marketing Letters - The digitization of money has led to the emergence of numerous virtual currencies. Despite their great financial relevance, virtual currencies have not received much attention...     

Making small firms happy? The heterogeneous effect of trade facilitation measures

The different facets of trade facilitation may impact heterogeneously exporters of different size and productivity. Using the cross‐sectional variation in procedures at the border, we identify how red tape affects trade through the extensive and/or the intensive margin and show that small and large exporters are affected differently. We observe that while information availability benefits both small and large exporters, other measures like advance ruling, appeal procedures and the automation of border formalities tend to favor large exporters. This result suggests that trade facilitation policies affect exporters through channels other than simply the fixed or variable cost component of the red tape barriers. Beyond affecting the size and composition of trade flows, uncertainty about the conditions of crossing borders plays an important role in shaping the demography of exporters across different destinations.     

Detecting Co‐Movements in Non‐Causal Time Series

This paper introduces the notion of common non‐causal features and proposes tools to detect them in multivariate time series models. We argue that the existence of co‐movements might not be detected using the conventional stationary vector autoregressive (VAR) model as the common dynamics are present in the non‐causal (i.e. forward‐looking) component of the series. We show that the presence of a reduced rank structure allows to identify purely causal and non‐causal VAR processes of order P>1 even in the Gaussian likelihood framework. Hence, usual test statistics and canonical correlation analysis can be applied, where either lags or leads are used as instruments to determine whether the common features are present in either the backward‐ or forward‐looking dynamics of the series. The proposed definitions of co‐movements are also valid for the mixed causal—non‐causal VAR, with the exception that a non‐Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator is necessary. This means however that one loses the benefits of the simple tools proposed. An empirical analysis on Brent and West Texas Intermediate oil prices illustrates the findings. No short run co‐movements are found in a conventional causal VAR, but they are detected when considering a purely non‐causal VAR.