Love, war and cultures: an institutional approach to human evolution

Love, war and culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultural differentiation cannot be taken for granted. Culture is the outcome of long evolutionary processes. It requires some human specific characteristics, including a large brain, that are likely to have been influenced by sexual selection and by the peculiar structure of human love affairs. Thus, if war may have generated love, also the reverse may be true: by favoring the development of human culture, love may have produced the conditions for war among culturally differentiated groups. In turn, war may have co-evolved with group solidarity only under the prevailing social arrangements of hunting and gathering economies. In general, human relations have been influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of history. They have been embedded in institutions involving very different levels of inequality, ranging from mostly egalitarian hunting and gathering societies to typically hierarchical agrarian societies and to wealth-differentiated industrial societies. The perspectives of the present-day knowledge-intensive economy can also be seen through the same institutional approach to human evolution. The different nature of contemporary production processes involves a new set of alternative possible arrangements that have different implications for social (in)equality and different capabilities to satisfy basic human needs.     

Using an Alternative Estimation Method to Perform Comprehensive Empirical Tests: An Application to Interest Rate Risk-Management

Using a sample of 241 U.S. bank holding companies, we test all relevant rationales for corporate risk-management activities related to interest rate risk. Three main results emerge: (1) measurement error and the possibility of multiple influences on the model's proxy variables indicate that the confirmatory factor analysis method can provide a more accurate and comprehensive test of interest rate risk-management rationales than conventional estimation techniques, (2) the corporate risk-management theories most consistently supported are those related to financial distress costs and firm size, and (3) an exogenous factor related to interest rate volatility negatively influences a firm's interest rate risk exposure.     

Climate change management: a resilience strategy for flood risk using Blockchain tools

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This work aims to offer a contribution in the analysis and management, from an economic and financial point of view, of the flood risk, and extended to the...     

Where Is the Market? Evidence from Cross-Listings in the United States

We analyze the location of stock trading for firms with a UScross-listing. The fraction of trading that occurs in the UnitedStates tends to be larger for companies from countries thatare geographically close to the United States and feature lowfinancial development and poor insider trading protection. Forcompanies based in developed countries, trading volume in theUnited States is larger if the company is small, volatile, andtechnology-oriented, while this does not apply to emerging countryfirms. The domestic turnover rate increases in the cross-listingyear and remains higher for firms based in developed markets,but not for emerging market firms. Domestic trading volume actuallydeclines for companies from countries with poor enforcementof insider trading regulation.     

Is local sourcing out of fashion in the globalization era? Evidence from Italian mechanical industry

The paper concerns a study on the changes affecting leading cluster companies' supplier relationships. In particular, the paper aims at investigating under which conditions and how industrial cluster companies rely on local suppliers in the current context of international competitive pressure and easier access to international supply sources. The research methodology is qualitative and based on a long-term longitudinal research of three case studies of Italian industrial cluster companies that are leading firms in specific niches of the mechanical industry. Two main questions are debated: under which conditions have industrial cluster companies relied on local suppliers? What has been the evolution of relationships between industrial cluster companies and their local suppliers? The empirical analysis shows that local suppliers have been playing strategic roles in different ways in distinct historical phases, contributing actively in terms of knowledge and competence development, production flexibility, delivery performance and cost efficiency.     

No institution is a free lunch: a reconstruction of Ronald Coase

The two major contributions of Ronald Coase, written at distant points of his long life, have been often interpreted as different and, somehow, contradicting views of the merits of the market mechanism. We argue that the underlying point of the two articles is the same, and it can be summarized by the statement that no institution is a free lunch. When the unity of the Coasian theory is properly understood, it offers a powerful challenge to standard neoclassical production theory and opens new analytical tools to understand and to compare the institutions of production.     

Barriers to investment in ICT

This paper studies the complementarity between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the related investment in human and organizational capital. Using firm-level data taken from a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, an ICT marginal product much higher than its user cost is estimated. It is then argued that missing complementary investments may have acted as barriers to investment in ICT. Results support the conjecture that the marginal product excess over the user cost is due to those firms that did not complement their ICT investment with an increase in the human capital of their labour force and with a reorganization of the workplace.     

Information sharing and credit: Firm-level evidence from transition countries

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability and lower cost of credit to firms. This correlation is stronger for opaque firms than transparent ones and stronger in countries with weak legal environments than in those with strong legal environments. In cross-sectional estimates, we control for variation in country-level aggregate variables that may affect credit, by examining the differential impact of information sharing across firm types. In panel estimates, we also control for the presence of unobserved heterogeneity at the firm level, as well as for changes in macroeconomic variables and the legal environment.