Belief-free price formation

We analyze security price formation in a dynamic setting in which long-lived dealers repeatedly compete for the opportunity to trade with short-lived retail traders. We characterize equilibria in which dealers’ pricing strategies are optimal irrespective of the private information that each dealer may possess. Thus, our model’s predictions are robust to different specifications of the dealers’ information structure. These equilibria reconcile, in a unified and parsimonious framework, price dynamics that are reminiscent of well-known stylized facts: excess price volatility, price to trading flow correlation, stochastic volatility and inventory-related trading.     

Updates management in mobile applications: iTunes versus Google Play

This paper focuses on a specific strategy that developers of mobile applications may use to stimulate demand: The release of updates. We develop a theoretical analysis that shows that developers have incentives to release updates when experiencing a drop in performance. The predictions of the model are then tested using an unbalanced panel of top 1,000 apps in iTunes and Google Play for five European countries. We estimate that while in iTunes the release of an update stimulates a 26% increase in download growth, in Google Play updates play a less significant role. This difference is partly due to systematic differences in apps and in developers operating in the two stores (“selection effect”), and partly to a lack of quality control on apps and updates in Google Play (“quality check effect”). These findings highlight the crucial importance of an appropriate management of updates as well as the relevance of institutional characteristics of the app stores.     

An organizational culture for all seasons? How cultural type dominance and strength influence different performance goals

Organizational culture might influence results, especially in public healthcare organizations characterized by strong professional control. This study investigates whether a specific culture type is most effective in fostering performances. We assess organizational culture through Competing Values Framework and use multivariate regression analysis to test the relationship between dominant culture and competitiveness and financial results. Based on 529 responses from senior managers of 59 organizations, we found that dominant rational and hierarchical culture types are associated, respectively, with higher competitiveness and better financial results. Enhancing a specific performance dimension might require cultural changes aimed to align values with targeted results.     

Rhetorical manifestation of institutional transformation

The present study proposes an analysis process to compare and contrast different approaches to content analysis. Moving from previous findings (Righettini and Sbalchiero, ICPP—international conference on public policy, 2015), related to consumer protection in the annual speeches of Italian Presidents of AGCOM, delivered between 2000 and 2015, statistical analyses of textual data are applied on the same set of texts in order to compare and contrast results and evaluate the opportunity of integrating different approaches to enrich the results. This review of results resorts to topic based methods for classification of context units (Reinert, Les Cah l’Anal Donnees 8(2):187–198, 1983), text clustering and lexical correspondence analysis (Lebart et al., Exploring textual data, 1998) in a general framework of content analysis and “lexical worlds” exploration (Reinert, Lang Soc 66:5–39, 1993), i.e., the identification of main topics and words used by AGCOM Presidents to talk about consumer protection. Results confirm the strengths and opportunities of topics detection approach and shed light on how quantitative methods might become useful to political scientists when available policy documents increase in number and size. One methodological innovation of this article is that it supplements the use of word categories in traditional content analysis with an automated topics analysis which exceeds the problems of reliability, replicability, and inferential circularity.     

Which shape fits best? Designing the organizational form of local government procurement

The way that public procurement activities are organized has an impact on the performance of public institutions. By reviewing the literature on public procurement organization dimensions this study offers a conceptual framework for public procurement organizational design, distinguishing between the macro, micro and process level dimensions. The framework is tested across the procurement departments of 15 local governments in Wales and Italy. We identify six alternative organizational configurations, differing in their level of centralization and their procurement status within the institution. Their suitability and potential for redesign depend on several internal and external contextual factors (goals, government decision, regulation, geographical environment) in line with the contingency view of organizational design.     

Effects of fiscal policy in the Northern and Southern regions of Italy

This paper contributes to a growing body of work within ‘fiscal policy studies,’ investigating the recent role of fiscal policy on the Italian economy. Using annual data collected on a regional basis, this study estimates and compares the (impact and cumulative) fiscal multipliers across the North and the South—the less developed area—of Italy. With recourse to a simultaneous equation model for the two macro-areas of Italy, it estimates the overall impact of the measures of budget consolidation policies during the period 2011–2013. Our analysis reveals that tax increases and, with a greater impact, spending cuts, hit the South harder compared to the North.     

Falling Wage Shares in Europe and the United States: How Important is Aggregation Bias?

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The application of a fixed-weight aggregation method changes the profile of the observed wage share in a significant way: in particular there is no longer sign of an overshooting of the wage share levels of the early-1970s. Error-correction wage equations based on the adjusted wage shares generally have a better regression fit and show long-run elasticities of real wages to unemployment that vary less across countries and are substantially lower than those obtained with observed shares.     

Global networks of trade and bits

Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed topologies of the Internet, but so far these data have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such information could be used to characterize both the size of the digital economy and outsourcing at country level. We analyse the topological structure of the network of trade in digital services (trade in bits) and compare it with the more traditional flow of manufactured goods across countries. To perform meaningful comparisons across networks with different characteristics, we define a stochastic benchmark for the number of connections among each country-pair, based on hypergeometric distribution. Original data are filtered so that we only focus on the strongest, i.e. statistically significant, links. We find that trade in bits displays a sparser and less hierarchical network structure, which is more similar to trade in high-skill manufactured goods than total trade. Moreover, distance plays a more prominent role in shaping the network of international trade in physical goods than trade in digital services.     

Mean–variance dominant trading strategies

The paper examines the relative importance of ten anomaly-based trading strategies. We employ Mean Variance spanning methodologies in a classical unconditional setting and a novel conditional setting. Fixed-weight optimal portfolios stemming from the unconditional methodology indicate that all the strategies are needed to enhance the mean–variance tradeoff. This conclusion is completely reversed when we allow for time-varying portfolio weights as a nonlinear function of lagged economic indicators. The overall results suggest that diversified anomaly-based holdings are of limited benefit to sophisticated investors who employ dynamic trading strategies.