Familial Risk for Exceptional Longevity

One of the most glaring deficiencies in the current assessment of mortality risk is the lack of information concerning the impact of familial longevity. In this article we update estimates of sibling relative risk of living to extreme ages using data from more than 1700 sibships, and we begin to examine the trend for heritability for different birth-year cohorts. We also build a network model that can be used to compute the increased chance for exceptional longevity of a subject, conditional on his or her family history of longevity. The network includes familial longevity from three generations and can be used to understand the effects of paternal and maternal longevity on an individual's chance to live to an extreme age.     

The New Method to Determine Ownership Stake to Exercise Control： An Empirical Analysis on Italian Companies

The idea of this work arises from the analysis of the researches developed in the literature on topic of ownership and control that are mostly based on threshold of ownership stake to determine control equal for all companies and, in most cases, not supported by theoretical arguments and empirical evidences. In fact, the aim of this paper is to build a new method of determining the threshold of ownership stake that allows the shareholder to exercise control. In particular, this survey uses all Italian listed companies as reference, and the minutes of the Ordinary and Extraordinary General Meetings of shareholders, in 2009-2012, as database. The topic can be enriched with further and future researches aiming to adapt this new method in a cross-country investigation and so to identify the different threshold for the countries, on the basis of the different national laws regarding the ownership stakes that affect the control.     

International strategy and performance—Clustering strategic types of SMEs

This paper identifies different strategic types of internationalised SMEs, in so doing providing managers and entrepreneurs with a much better understanding of the main strategic options and their relationship with the international performance of firms. We provide a theoretical analysis of strategic orientations and strategic behaviour in international SMEs, followed by an empirical investigation based on a sample of Italian SMEs. The SMEs are grouped into strategic types using cluster analysis, and the link between strategic type and international performance is subsequently analysed using logistic regression. The empirical data suggest that there are four broad strategic types, namely an entrepreneurial/growth-oriented group of firms, a customer-oriented group, a product/inward-oriented cluster, and a further group of firms that lacks strategic orientation. The characteristics of the strategic clusters are discussed, and the regression results show that a clear and proactive strategic orientation and its consistency with business strategy leads to improved international performance. This confirms the positive and highly significant role of strategic types.     

Trade liberalization and organizational change

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate their firms, trading off the pecuniary benefits of coordinating production decisions with the private benefits of operating in their preferred ways. The price of output is a crucial determinant of this choice, since it affects the size of the pecuniary benefits. Organizational choices also depend on the terms of trade in supplier markets, which affect the division of surplus between managers. We show that, even when firms do not relocate across countries, the price changes triggered by the liberalization of product markets can lead to changes in ownership structures within countries. The removal of barriers to factor mobility can also induce widespread restructuring, which can lead to increases in product prices (or declines in quality), hurting consumers worldwide.     

The Impact of EU Preferential Trade Agreements on Foreign Direct Investment

Although North–South preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are expected to affect foreign direct investment (FDI), there is not much evidence to date on the impact of EU PTAs on the pattern of FDI. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of EU PTAs on the outward stocks of FDI of the EU. We estimate a model based on the knowledge‐capital theory of the multinational enterprise over the period 1995–2005 using a sample of 173 host countries. Explanatory variables include measures of the level of bilateral protection and a dummy to capture the impact of deep integration provisions of PTAs. A dynamic panel model with fixed effects is used in order to take into account the dynamic behaviour of FDI and the heterogeneity bias. Results show that EU FDI is both horizontal and vertical. The level of EU protection affects FDI negatively, while the impact of the tariffs applied by host countries varies across groups of partner countries. Deep integration provisions affect EU FDI positively.     

Financial sophistication and the distribution of the welfare cost of inflation

The welfare cost of anticipated inflation is quantified in a calibrated model of the U.S. economy that exhibits tractable equilibrium dispersion in wealth and earnings. Inflation does not generate large losses in societal welfare, yet its impact varies noticeably across segments of society depending also on the financial sophistication of the economy. If money is the only asset, then inflation mostly hurts the wealthier and more productive agents, while those poorer and less productive may even benefit from inflation. The converse holds in a more sophisticated financial environment where agents can insure against consumption risk with assets other than money.     

The determinants of whistleblowing in public administrations: an analysis conducted in Italian health organizations,universities, and municipalities

The aim of this paper is to examine which variables are most important in encouraging whistleblowing in Italian public administrations, as a result of the compulsory application of the anti-corruption Law No. 190/2012. Our research is based on an empirical analysis of 365 public administrations: 86 hospitals, 137 health agencies, 39 universities, and 103 major Italian municipalities.

The results show that whistleblowing seems to occur more frequently in large public administrations, to be associated with formal procedures and an organizational proceduralization that encourages individuals to actually blow the whistle, and that it is only partially correlated to training and education.