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The effects of environmental, social and governance disclosure on the cost of capital in small and medium enterprises: the role of family business status
No full textEnvironmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure has become a critical component of corporate reporting. However, the effectiveness of this type of disclosure remains poorly explored among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), despite the fact that these businesses represent the majority of firms around the world. By leveraging on a dataset of Italian listed SMEs, we fill this gap to shed new light on the effects of nonfinancial disclosure on the cost of capital. The study reveals that, in stark contrast with the evidence on large companies, environmental disclosure for SMEs is bound to provoke an increase in the cost of capital. Yet this pattern is capsized when the company is a family SME, as it benefits from environmental disclosure, as large companies do
International industrial symbiosis: cross-border management of aggregates and construction and demolition waste between Italy and Switzerland
No full textThis article describes an international industrial symbiosis located in Canton Ticino, Switzerland, and Lombardy, Italy, involving virgin aggregates and construction and demolition waste. It discusses the potential of the industrial symbiosis to manage transport strategies and its geographic extension, to reduce substantially its transport related externalities, currently equivalent to 11% of the symbiosis value. With recourse to a key informant monitoring methodology, primary and secondary sources, this article estimates the symbiosis' transport environmental impacts, external costs, and returns to distance under various scenarios. We show that intermodal transport strategies have the potential to reduce transport's carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by up to 61% and external costs by up to 81%, and to widen the industrial symbiosis' geographic extension beyond the current 50 km. We also discuss how, despite changes and disagreements in the objectives of different cross-border regional authorities to manage the international industrial symbiosis, the coordination of different mechanisms and incentives is essential for the sustainable management of this international industrial symbiosis. The aim of the article is twofold. Firstly, to highlight the importance of assessing the contribution of transport to the overall industrial symbiosis' environmental impacts, rather than consider transport and its impacts as externally given variables. And secondly, to show policy and decision makers additional methods, and inter-regional authorities coordination experiences, in order to assess impacts and manage an industrial symbiosis in more sustainable ways
Università Cattaneo working papers
No full textAmong the statistical techniques used to describe the behaviour of the financial markets, one of the most promising is based on the network analysis of the stock market. In this framework, the stock market is represented as a graph with nodes (the single stocks), edges (connections between stocks), and attributes (industry classification, volumes ...). The application of network analysis to the stock market is not new, but in previous contributions the market graph has been mainly derived from the correlationmatrix of the stock prices. This is a limitation, and the risks are to express in different words what traditional financial econometrics has already said about the returns' distribution. Moreover, if we want to use network analysis not only as a descriptive tool but also as an inference instrument, we need other data than the correlation matrix itself. For this reason, we integrated the analysis and built the market graph with new type of data taken from the observation of the information gathering activity performed by retail investors through the Google's search engine. We focussed the attention on financial crises, when a shock hits the economy in such a profound way that almost all the parameters entering the pricing equation of stocks must be reassessed. Those periods are relatively rare and short. They are characterised by extremely high levels of volatility and correlation. In these moments, searching for new information becomes of paramount importance. And then it is in these moments that we expect to observe more neatly the working of the underlying network
Applying set optimization to weak efficiency
No full textSet-valued extensions of vector-valued functions are used to investigate the relations between weak efficiency and variational inequalities (both Stampacchia and Minty type) which allows to apply the complete lattice framework from set optimization. Since the seminal work of Giannessi, it has been a challenge to generalize scalar results to the vector case. In this effort, some notions of generalized derivatives for vector-valued functions have been introduced, either in the form of set-valued functions or introducing appropriate notions of infinite elements in vector spaces. Switching the focus to set optimization in conlinear spaces, we propose a Dini-type derivative, that keeps the same set-valued form of the optimization problem
A new logistics model for increasing economic sustainability of perishable food supply chains through intermodal transportation
No full textAs urgency in limiting greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions has increased, greening freight and perishable food logistics activities has become an issue of interest. Intermodal rail-road transportation allows for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, one of the reasons this mode is traditionally not employed to move perishable food is because it is considered to be economically unsustainable. This paper aims to present a new transportation model for perishable food (named ‘traveling stock’), which removes the barriers to the implementation of the intermodal transportation of perishable food. Moreover, based on a methodology for quantifying the economic sustainability of the new logistics model, this paper outlines the assessment through a case study. The work finds that the level to which consumers appreciate product variety influences the extent of economic sustainability for the intermodal transportation of perishable products
Addressing circular economy through design for X approaches: a systematic literature review
No full textGuided by a technological revolution, widely discussed paradigms as servitization and Circular Economy (CE) are progressively pushing manufacturers towards delivering increasingly complex solutions. Design plays a strategic role in this sense, either considering products, services or Product-Service Systems (PSSs). Concurrent engineering and, specifically, Design for X (DfX) approaches have been widely associated to products, revealing great potentialities for enhancing service functionalities like supportability and circularity. Again, DfX approaches have been already exploited to systematically support the PSS design process, given their re-known ability to allow a better information sharing between product designers and service managers. However, even if several DfX approaches related with the End of Life (EoL) stage already exist (e.g. Design for recycling, remanufacturing and EoL), they still need to better fit with a circular design perspective. Therefore, the aim of this paper is exploring and understanding how design can contribute towards a CE transition through the adoption of DfX approaches
Private equity e private debt: i vantaggi della società partecipata
No full textNel posto covid molte aziende necessitano di aiuti esterni per svilupparsi. Un valido aiuto è il Private capital, ma come trovare il giusto partner