More long-term care for better healthcare and vice versa: investigating the mortality effects of interactions between these public sectors

Public healthcare (HC) and long-term care (LTC) sectors coexist in several OECD countries. Economic interactions between these two sectors have been found to occur even in the absence of formal integrated care arrangements. We investigate whether and how interactions between the HC and LTC sectors impact mortality. We analyse data on English local authorities in 2014–15 and employ a sequence of cross-sectional econometric specifications based on instrumental variables to identify the effect that LTC expenditure has on mortality through its interactions with HC services, and vice versa. Our findings suggest that any effect of LTC expenditure on mortality is likely to run through the HC sector by allowing the latter to reallocate resources from less to more effective services. A 10 per cent increase in LTC expenditure per user can indirectly save, on average, about three lives per million individuals. In addition, on top of the known HC direct mortality effects, we find that investing an extra £42 million in the HC sector – equivalent to a 10 per cent increase in HC expenditure per capita for the average local authority – can decrease the use of LTC services, producing around £7.8 million of savings. These can generate mortality effects if invested in services having an impact on mortality.     

Budget Rules and Flexibility in the Public Sector: Towards a Taxonomy

The practices and norms of public budgeting have often been seen as a brake on the flexibility needed of government organisations. This remains true despite historically significant financial management reforms designed around budgetary devolution. Seeing flexibility as operating along two dimensions – devolution and discretion – this paper revisits the underlying features of traditional public budgeting to develop a taxonomy of six generic ‘budget rules’. By isolating key properties of budget control, the paper uses two of the more prominent rules – annuality and purpose – to illustrate how the rules interact to generate control capacity, as well as the scope for rule variability in promoting increased flexibility.     

The Crisis of Companies from an Italian Perspective: Reorganization and Fresh Money

Today, the role of fresh money in the reorganization of companies is a central matter in the Italian crisis law. The analysis comes from the recent reforms of the Italian Bankruptcy Law, aimed at revitalizing the pre‐insolvency procedures for overcoming the crisis of companies. These reforms draw inspiration from Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. In particular, three new rules have been introduced in the Italian Bankruptcy Law in order to facilitate the obtaining of credit by companies in crisis. These rules recognize priority in reimbursement for claims related to financing. Their target is to incentivize those (not only banks) who want to grant new finance to enterprises in crisis. The target is so important for the legislator that the rules permit the discrimination of companies' creditors on the basis of a judicial valuation of the conditions required for priority by the law in specific cases. The traditional and important principle of equal treatment of unsecured creditors is even more neglected. But the specific meaning of the rules and their inclusion in a sort of company crisis law in time of crisis induce to confine the forms of credit to which the rules refer to and to limit the space for extensive interpretations or applications by analogy. Copyright © 2016 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Out-migration and economic cycles

Out-migration concerns foreigners who decide to leave a country where they used to live. Taking advantage of the OECD bilateral IMS database, we analyze the short-run determinants of out-migration using a panel of Schengen countries between 1995 and 2011. We find that out-migration is counter-cyclical: foreign nationals tend to leave host countries with high unemployment, while they are likelier to stay in good times (i.e. low unemployment). Typically, a 10 % increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 5 % increase in out-migration. Thus, short-term economic fluctuations have the same qualitative effect as restrictive migration policies in economic downturns. However, we find mixed evidence for the role of economic cycles in the potential destination countries of those flows. Movers appear to be sensitive to unemployment changes in their country of origin, but they do not seem to be sensitive to business cycles in potential destinations.     

Digital Transformation and Innovation Management: A Synthesis of Existing Research and an Agenda for Future Studies

Management and organizational scholars have paid increasing attention to the interconnections between digital transformation and innovation management in the last decade. However, a highly fragmented understanding of this topic is what we are left with so far. In this editorial, we suggest an approach to open up the black box of the interplay between digital transformation and innovation management by providing a framework that identifies three levels of analyisis (i.e., macro, meso, and micro) along which existing and future research on the topic can be organized. This model encourages scholars to conduct theoretical and empirical studies on how digital transformation affects ecosystems’ structure and governance, how industries and firms compete and organize for innovation in a digitalized world, how the processes for developing new products and services change under the effect of digital technologies, and the implications of digital transformation on managing people and teams involved in the innovation process, among the other topics. We also provide a synthesis of the eight papers published in the Special Issue that this editorial introduces and develop an agenda for future research that will hopefully contribute to encourage and shape future scholarly efforts into this field.     

The determinants of innovation in green supply chains: evidence from an Italian sectoral study

Innovation processes are increasingly spreading through the unbounded universe of European small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It represents a fundamental opportunity especially for those SMEs operating in the so‐called ‘green economy’ sectors, in order to be competitive in a National, European and International market with their sustainable products and services. Drawing upon a database of over 300 enterprises operating within the eight defined green sectors, this paper assesses the determinants and drawbacks of innovation. In particular, by using an econometrical approach, we tested the following propositions: (1) small dimension of enterprises is not an obstacle to their innovation capabilities; (2) the adoption of an internationalisation strategy is an opportunity and a stimulus to innovation for SMEs; (3) cooperation with research centres, financial partners, trade association and public entities can help SMEs to overcome difficulties and help them to develop and offer innovative products and services, so to be competitive at an international level. The econometric analysis shows a positive impact of the variables ‘dimension’ and ‘level of internationalisation’ on innovation capabilities. In addition, cooperation with research centres and access to capital market are positively related with effective innovations.     

Economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change - a rejoinder

[Ackermann, F., Stanton, E., 2008-this issue. A comment on economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: human health. Ecological Economics. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.10.006] criticise our recent paper [Bosello, F., Roson, R., Tol, R.S.J., 2006. Economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: human health. Ecological Economics 58, 579-591] on different levels, calling it “mistaken” and “misleading”. We welcome the opportunity to respond. The critique of [Ackermann, F., Stanton, E., 2008-this issue. A comment on economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: human health. Ecological Economics. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.10.006] is either misdirected or incorrect.     

Walras’ theory of capital formation: an intertemporal equilibrium reformulation

We develop a mainstream reformulation of the original Walras?? model of capital accumulation. We overcome the shortcomings of the original model. First, we prove the existence of intertemporal competitive equilibria. Our proof combines a well known theorem due to Yannelis and Prabhakar (J Math Econ 12:233?C245, 1983) with a lemma due to Geanakoplos (Econ Theory 21:585?C603, 2003). Secondly, we remedy the indeterminacy of allocation of savings across multiple types of capital goods by introducing a storage technology. Finally, we show that, for stored capital goods, the equality of rates of returns emerges endogenously in equilibrium, while it was imposed by Walras from the outset in his original contribution.     

Which factors are perceived as obstacles for the growth of Italian academic spin-offs?

During the last decades, academic spin-offs have received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, mainly due to their ability to advance industrial application of scientific knowledge. In the past, scholars believed that these organisations were subjected to fast growth after their establishment. Only in the last decade, scholars realise that the fast-growing perspective hypothesised was an oversimplification, as the majority of high-tech academic spin-offs growth slowly or remain small in size for long time. The aim of our study is to investigate the reasons that inhibit the growth of established academic spin-offs, focusing on the Italian context. Through the implementation of the Delphi technique and of the fuzzy logic we derive new and relevant results, for scholars, spin-offs’ managers and policy-makers.     

A Rational Explanation for the Redistribution Paradox. Theory and Empirical Evidence

The paper provides a rational explanation for the redistribution paradox, whereby low‐income individuals seeking more social security prefer a lower taxation although this might imply a reduced welfare. A simple model of tax transfer and redistribution is presented, with various agents facing two different unemployment probabilities. We investigate how the preferred tax rate changes with the probability of being unemployed. We show that, when the probability of unemployment for the less‐skilled correlates negatively with that of the highly skilled, the relationship with the tax rate is not monotonic and depends on the level of risk aversion. This theoretical framework is confirmed in an empirical investigation based on microeconomic data, and in a robustness test based on macroeconomic data.