The equations unveiled: Sraffa's price equations in the making

In the first part of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities,four equation systems are introduced: three are drawn up inorder to solve the problem of relative prices; the last oneis devised to define a suitable standard of prices. The bookwas published in 1960, but—as we are told in the preface—its‘central propositions’ and a first version of theprice equations had been originally conceived and written morethan 30 years before, when the author was still in his twenties.Having access now to the Sraffa Papers, preserved in the WrenLibrary, we can ascertain the intellectual origin of the equations.In this paper the analytical path that led to the final draftof the price equation is followed, step by step, and the linkbetween these equations and Sraffa's quest for an ‘invariablestandard of value’ is clarified.     

Occupational and Internal Labor Markets in Japan

The distinction between internal and occupational labor markets requires the development of informative indicators that go beyond standard measures such as firm size, which are too vague. This article develops an alternative measure, based on the comparison between firm-specific and occupation-specific tenure, and applies it to Japanese occupational data. We believe that the proposed measure is useful not only in classifying different occupations according to the degree of labor market internalization but also in documenting changes over time in job definition, "reengineering" of the corporation, and the like.     

Stratified or Comprehensive? The Economic Efficiency of School Design

We study the efficiency of secondary school design by focusing on the degree of differentiation between vocational and general education. Using a simple model of endogenous job composition, we analyze the interaction between relative demand and relative supply of skills and characterize efficient school design when the government runs schools and cares about total net output. We show that neither a comprehensive nor a stratified system unambiguously dominates the other system in terms of efficiency for all possibile values of the underlying parameters. Since comprehensive systems generate more equal labour market outcomes, it follows that the relationship between efficiency and equity in secondary education is not necessarily a trade off.     

The role of international banking in the ‘oil surplus’ adjustment process

In the rapidly changing and dramatically volatile oil market in which the balances of payments of the various countries are characterized by an unpreeendented variability, the role of international banks in the intermediations between countries, has been crucial. The stabilization function of the banking system which is instrumental in allowing a more rational oil production policy and investment policy has been since 1980 under considerable stress due to a decline of deposits. In this paper we shall first analyze the general framework of the problem and then the specific decision process of the banking system by emphasizing the differences between micro- and macroeconomic aspects.     

Antithetic variates to estimate the simulation bias in non-linear models

This paper describes a Monte Carlo experiment, which makes use of antithetic variate sampling, to get an accurate estimate of the deterministic simulation bias in the non-linear Klein—Goldberger model. The computational efficiency is more than 500 times greater than in case of simple random sampling.     

The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Enterprises in Small Backward Economies: the Case of Chad and Gabon

This paper examines the impact of trade and fiscal reforms and of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc on enterprise development in Chad and Gabon. These reforms provide a natural experiment to assess the impact of trade liberalization in countries with a small and backward manufacturing sector. The empirical analysis is based on a new panel data base covering virtually the whole population of manufacturing firms in Chad and Gabon, and containing data spanning from the year before to two years after the reforms. The paper finds that although firms’ response to changing incentives was non‐negligible, with a shift of output from nontradable to tradable and an increase in productivity, the reform process was unable to generate a virtuous and self‐sustained circle, where export expansion brings a generalized productivity increase which in turn feeds on further export growth.     

Asset restructuring strategies in bank acquisitions: Does distance between dealing partners matter?

One of the most lively-debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transaction-based products, at the expense of small and informationally opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring strategies pursued by the acquirer with respect to the asset portfolio of the acquired bank: a cleaning strategy (CS), in which the acquirer makes a clean sweep of all the negative net present value activities in the portfolio of the acquired bank, and a portfolio strategy (PS), in which the acquiring bank permanently changes the portfolio allocation of the acquired bank. In this paper we focus on Italian bank acquisitions and test which asset restructuring strategy was predominantly pursued over the period 1997–2003. Moreover, we distinguish acquisitions according to their geographic diversifying character and to the physical and cultural distances that separate acquiring from acquired banks. When we look at the mean value, we do not find clear evidence of a primacy either of CSs or PSs. When we separate in-market from out-of-market bank acquisitions, however, results show that the CSs prevail only in the former type of deals, while in the latter the portfolio of acquired banks is subject to PSs. Finally, we find that differences in asset restructuring strategies can be explained by differences in corporate culture and the workplace environment of the dealing partners.     

Measuring Innovation in European Industry

This paper analyses the results of the 1993 Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Fifty per cent of European firms introduced a product or process innovation during 1990-92. The share of innovating firms varies between industrial sectors and firm size. The percentage of innovating firms is higher for large firms than for smaller ones. In high-tech sectors this share is two thirds and for traditional ones is one third. The largest part of firms' expenditure for innovation is linked to the adoption and diffusion of technologies through machinery and equipment, which absorbs 50% of firms' innovation expenditure. R&D activities represent, on average, 20% of total innovation expenditure while other innovative activities, such as design and trial production, account respectively for 10% and 11%. The mix of innovation inputs, especially R&D and investment, is strongly correlated with firm size, displays little change across countries and varies greatly across industries.     

Classification of longitudinal career paths

The aim of the present article is to classify, in terms of contractual stability, the careers of the workers in a specified territorial context (Province of Milan-Italy), utilizing large administrative archives. The final goal is a synthetic clustering that identifies individuals in homogeneous groups regarding the longitudinal sequences of contractual typologies occurring in the evolution of vocational experiences during their career, identifying, on the one hand, the worker profiles that remain stable in each contractual typology and on the other hand, the profiles that improve or worsen contractual stability over time. Methodologically, our approach uses a combination of scaling methods to estimate stability scores of each contractual typology and Latent mixture models to cluster similar trajectories. Specifically, the scores of contractual stability were performed by Multidimensional Scaling with individual preferences, taking into account the ordinal nature of distances among contractual typologies and the heterogeneity factors of the subjects. Further, Latent Growth Mixture models, capitalizing the longitudinal property of data sequences, were proposed to identify distinctive, prototypical developmental trajectories of contractual stability within the analyzed population.