Interregional Migration of Human Capital and Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Italian Provinces

Since the mid‐1990s interregional migration flows in Italy have dramatically increased, especially from the South to the North. These flows are characterized by a strong component of human capital, involving a large number of workers with secondary and tertiary education. Using longitudinal data for the period 2002–2011 at NUTS‐3 territorial level, we document that long‐distance (i.e., South‐North) net migration of high‐skill workers has increased the unemployment at origin and decreased it at destination, thus deepening North–South unemployment disparities. On the other hand, long‐distance net migration of low‐skill workers has had the opposite effect, by lowering the unemployment at origin and raising it at destination. Further evidence also suggests that the diverging effect of high‐skill migration dominates the converging effect of low‐skill migration. Thus, concerns for an ‘internal brain drain’ from Southern regions look not groundless.     

Lumpiness,capital adjustment costs and investment dynamics

Aggregate investment in the US economy displays a hump-shaped pattern in response to shocks, and the autocorrelation of aggregate investment growth is positive for the first few quarters, turning negative for the later quarters. This paper shows that this feature of the data is the natural outcome of a two-sector consumption/investment model designed and calibrated to reproduce plant-level evidence on capital accumulation.     

Can price regulation increase cost-efficiency?

This paper examines the possibility that price regulation increases a monopolist's cost-efficiency. When the firm's choice of cost-reducing effort depends on the output supplied, a binding price-cap, by compelling the monopolist to produce more, results in lower costs. On the basis of a two-period asymmetric information model, the paper demonstrates that price regulation increases efficiency when the elasticity of demand is sufficiently low, even assuming very conservative preferences of the regulator and asymmetric information. Moreover, contrary to previous findings and conventional wisdom, we find that a periodical rate base review may increase productive efficiency through the positive effect on future cost-reducing effort, counterbalancing its well known adverse effect on the current level of effort.     

HUMAN CAPITAL MEASUREMENT: A SURVEY

Abstract After a short history of the concept of human capital (henceforth HC) in economic thought ( Section 1 ), this study presents the two main methods for estimating the value of the stock of HC – the retrospective and prospective one – with a review of the models proposed ( Section 2 ). These methods are linked both to the theory of HC investment as a rational choice ( Section 3 ), the literature analysing the contribution of HC investment to economic growth and the HC estimating method through educational attainment ( Section 4 ). The more recent literature on HC as a latent variable is also assessed ( Section 5 ) and a new method of estimation where HC is seen both as an unknown function of formative indicators and as a ‘latent effect’ underlying earned income is proposed ( Section 6 ). Section 7 concludes.     

Early stage SME bankruptcy: does the local banking market matter?

Small Business Economics - This paper investigates the role of local context, with regard to the effect of local financial development and banking concentration, on a firm’s probability of...     

Analysing Social Capital and Product Innovativeness in the Relationship Evolution of Born-Global Companies the Mediating Role of Knowledge Acquisition

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Relatively little is known about how born-global companies (BGs) innovate abroad during their lifecycle or about how the international...     

A social contract approach to sustainability

This paper asks whether it is possible to derive a concern for future generations (“sustainability”) from an account of the firm as a social contract (SC) among its stakeholders. Two aspects of a leading SC model of the firm limit its usefulness for an analysis of sustainability. First, the stakeholders provide investments to the firm over time. Second, the relationship between contemporaries and future generations is marked by asymmetries of power and knowledge that need to be considered while reconstructing the SC today. I discuss three reformulations of the SC that are all, in principle, capable of introducing within the SC a concern for future generations. The first describes the contractors as heads of families. The second envisages a grand meeting of stakeholders of all generations. The third, which I find most defensible, views the SC as an ahistorical agreement reached behind a thick veil of ignorance. This agreement is based on John Rawls’s norm of reciprocity, whereby the stakeholders adopt today the decision they wish all previous (and future) generations had made regarding the rate of consumption of natural resources and emission of pollutants.     

Home bias in divestment decisions of multinational corporations in the EU

We empirically investigate the claim that multinational corporations (MNCs) suffer from a “home bias” in divestment decisions: MNCs prefer to divest from foreign subsidiaries because the “emotional involvement” and the commitment in divesting from domestic subsidiaries is larger. This issue has not been yet empirically explored in the economic literature, although it is quite recurrent in the political debate on MNCs and FDI. Using detailed company‐level data on the EU corporate groups during the economic crisis (2008–2014), we show that, in spite of prima facie empirical evidence of a home bias, the bias disappears when firm‐, country‐, and sector‐specific factors are accounted for.