Perverse Incentives? Labor Market Regulation and Performance in the Public Sector

We test the link between labor market regulations and job performance in the public sector using a novel outcome variable, namely, the number of days it takes the postal service to return letters sent to nonexistent foreign addresses, a measure that we argue is an excellent proxy for job performance. We find a positive and statistically significant link between these two variables, regardless of the labor regulation measure employed, changes in specification, and even unlikely endogeneity considerations, which suggest that this finding may be causal.     

Making sense of the sharing economy: a business model innovation perspective

ABSTRACT

The emergence of a sharing revolution is leading to a new societal system of collaboration enabled by digital technologies. Although sharing-based initiatives are re-shaping established organisational practices and innovating traditional business models (BMs), existing research fails in grasping the phenomenon's multiple facets. This study aims at making sense of the Sharing Economy (SE) by shedding light on how startups embed the social trend of sharing and leverage digital technologies to develop innovative BMs. We attempt to solve the current theory-practice misalignment by proposing an original framework, definition, and classification of SE startups. The study presents a cluster analysis on 196 SE startups. We argue that SE startups group into five clusters: (i) pseudo-sharing; (ii) gig economy; (iii) crowd-based economy; (iv) pooling economy; and (v) P2P rental. This study contributes to positioning the SE from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective, interpreting the SE phenomenon from the theoretical lenses of BM Innovation, and classifying it through the unit of analysis of startups, intended as empirical vehicles and manifestation of the phenomenon.     

To Work or Not to Work? The Effect of Higher Pension Age on Cardiovascular Health

This study investigates the effect of pension age on hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases using administrative social security and hospital discharge records in Italy. The endogeneity of the retirement decision is addressed using an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous variation in pension age determined by quarter of birth. Results indicate a detrimental effect of higher pension age only for retirees who, before retirement, were suffering worse health and were employed in lower quality and more physically demanding jobs. Among them, a 1-year delay in pension claiming increases the risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases by approximately 2.6 percentage points.     

An investigation over inbound open innovation in SMEs: insights from an Italian manufacturing sample

ABSTRACT

Building on the Open Innovation (OI) framework, the purpose of this paper is to examine the R&D inbound model of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, we focus on the impact of different horizontal R&D collaborations on product innovation and innovation performance. Hypotheses are tested using a Probit/Tobit regression on an Italian sample of 2591 manufacturing SMEs. Our analysis shows that collaborating with different horizontal R&D partners brings to different innovation outcomes. In particular, R&D collaboration with universities has a positive impact on product innovation, but not on innovation performance. Whereas, R&D collaboration with research centres and other private companies has a positive impact on both product innovation and innovation performance. Our findings provide implications for SMEs managers and entrepreneurs who have to decide between R&D partners for their innovation strategy. Avenues for future research are discussed.     

Performance of foreign subsidiaries “in” and “from” Asia: A review,synthesis and research agenda

The performance of foreign subsidiaries (FS) has been the topic of studies since the beginning of the international business (IB) field. However, research findings are contradictory because of the disparate foci of individual studies. In this review paper, we first identify key determinants of the performance of FS through a structured content analysis of 73 articles and 679 relationships since the year 2000. Second, we explain the effects of each determinant, and perform meta-analysis to determine which relationships are statistically meaningful. Third, we compare the effects of determinants across different combinations of home and host contexts, based on which, we provide possible explanations of previous inconsistent findings. We conclude by offering new theoretical directions to better understand determinants of the performance of FS.     

Why Does the Interest Rate Decline Over the Day? Evidence from the Liquidity Crisis

We provide a simple model, able to explain why the overnight (ON) rate follows a downward intraday pattern, implicitly creating a positive intraday interest rate. While this normally reflects only some frictions, a liquidity crisis introduces a new component: the chance of an upward jump of the ON rate, which must be compensated by an intraday decline of the ON rate. By analyzing real time data for the e-MID interbank market, we show that the intraday rate has increased from a negligible level to a significant one after the start of the liquidity crisis in August 2007, and even more so since September 2008. The intraday rate is affected by the likelihood of a dry-up of the ON market, proxied by the 3M Euribor—Eonia swap spread. This evidence supports our model and it shows that a liquidity crisis impairs the ability of central banks to curb the market price of intraday liquidity, even by providing free daylight overdrafts. Such results have implications for the efficiency of the money market and of payment systems, as well as for the operational framework of central banks.     

Public Governance and School Performance

Abstract

According to the New Public Governance paradigm, this paper analyses the institutional and organizational conditions that can lead to an improvement in student learning (a typical co-produced outcome) by acting on the promotion of genuine collaborative relationships. The distinctive features of Italian distributed governance and the challenges for school management are discussed by examining TIMSS and INVALSI data. The results show that collaborative public management supports schools in improving student learning, confirming the research hypothesis for primary schools (IV grade) and schools that operate in socially and economically poor contexts.     

Does FOMC news increase global FX trading?

Does global currency volume increase on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) days? To test hypotheses of abnormal currency volume on FOMC days, a new data set from the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) Bank is used. The CLS measure captures more than half of the global trading volume in foreign exchange (FX) markets. The evidence shows that FX trading volume increases about 5% in the spot and the spot-next market following FOMC deliberations. The novelty of this result is that the aggregated CLS data controls for responses in various derivatives markets: a feature that existing studies based on intradaily data for specific trading platforms do not consider.     

Credit quality and technical efficiency in banking

We estimate banks’ technical efficiency using directional distance functions, a generalization of the radial distance functions that allow us to credit banks for their efforts to increase outputs and decrease resource use and bad loans. We find that once bad loans are considered, banks’ efficiency increases significantly. In addition, omitting bad loans may result in the underestimation of the performance of good credit quality banks. These results suggest that a significant aspect of banking production, credit quality, needs to be considered when evaluating banks’ performances for regulatory purposes.