1,720,987 research outputs found
FDI potential and shortfalls in South Mediterranean countries: the role of institutions as determinants and diversion forces
No full textWe examine FDI flows (1994-2003) from the EU to two neighbouring regions: Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the South Mediterranean area (MED). A GLS random effect gravity regression of the determinants of bilateral FDI flows to a large sample of 84 developed and developing partners shows that MED countries are not different from the rest of the sample, and from the CEE region in particular, once institutional and policy variables are included in the analysis, i.e. the actual capital inflows to MED economies are not much different from the flows predicted on the basis of a gravity equation enlarged to include policy and institutional factors. This suggests that the low inflows of FDI to the MED region might correspond to equilibrium conditions given institutional and policy distortions which economic agents have to face. The analysis also provides circumstantial evidence that the intensification of FDI in CEE, following integration with the EU, has had no discernible dampening effect on FDI flows directed to MED countries. The lack of displacement effects is confirmed by the common trends followed by coefficients obtained interacting yearly with regional dummies representing the two neighbouring areas considered
Does multinational ownership affect firm survival in Italy?
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to investigate whether and how multinational status and foreign ownership affect the survival of Italian
manufacturing and service firms. To this end, we analyze firm survival by distinguishing Italian firms as foreign multinationals
(FMNEs), domestic multinationals (DMNEs) or domestic non-multinational firms (NMNEs). The empirical analysis, carried out
over the period 2004-2008, is based on the Kaplan-Meier survival estimator and on the Cox proportional hazard model, in which
we look for the impact of ownership dummies on firm survival, controlling for several firm and industry specific covariates. Our
findings reveal that manufacturing and service firms owned by foreign multinationals are more likely to exit the market than
either DMNEs or NMNEs. Moreover, DMNEs show a higher chance of survival in services. By decomposing firm activities into
different technological classes, we also find that foreign ownership still exerts a negative influence on firm survival in both static
and dynamic industries, while domestic multinationals in less-knowledge-intensive services appear more persistent
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Firm performances, international activities and innovation. A micro level analysis on Italian firms
Full text link2015 - 2016The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the debate on the relationship between innovation and internationalization. After providing in Chapter 1 a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and empirical debate on this relationship, we investigate in chapter 2 the impact of being involved in international market on innovation disentangling different strategies of foreign activity in order to add empirical evidence to the branch of the literature on learning-to-innovate-by-internationalization (LIBI) (Chapter 2). Finally, in Chapter 3, we examine the role of persistency in both innovation and export activity to see if the long-lasting involvements ensure higher returns on productivity. We will go through these different steps using data on Italian manufacturing firms covering an eight year time-span (1998-2006), drawn from three waves (VIII, IX, X) of the AIDA Capitalia Survey of Manufacturing firms.
Going more in detail, in Chapter 1 we go through the debate going on in the literature in recent decades analyzing the change in theoretical perspective from an industry level approach that was in the vogue up to the end of ‘90s, to the growing importance of firms’ heterogeneity that has been introduced at start of the century. This change in perspective has been reflected in the empirical literature and we will see the different branches and the main contributions to them.
The contribution to the literature we want to give in Chapter 2 is not only focused on exports as in the majority of the works in this field (see for surveys Wagner 2007, 2012; and, for Italy, Gattai, 2015) but the novelty of our approach is to consider different level of involvements in international activities: export, FDI and outsourcing. Moreover, we measure the impact of these strategies on different kinds of innovation: first of all, we will see if and how each strategy influences innovation performance as a whole, then we distinguish between product and process innovation. Our estimation models have been carried out through complementary methodologies: starting, first of all,
FIRM PERFORMANCES, INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES AND INNOVATION.
A MICRO LEVEL ANALYSIS ON ITALIAN FIRMS.
with probit estimation, then moving to propensity score matching estimation to cope with endogeneity issues, and finally also using Heckman correction to control for any selection bias due to unobservable. What comes out from our results is that: 1) both exports and FDIs have a positive impact on innovation and the latter strategy has also an higher impact on the probability of introducing innovation if we consider any type of innovation; 2) when we consider product innovation, exporting and investing abroad raise the probability of introducing such kind of innovation; 3) outsourcing, instead, shows positive and significant coefficient when we consider process innovation suggesting that firms contracting out to other partners some stages of the production may introduce some innovation to optimize the whole process. Then, since destination of international activities may influence the outcome, we also distinguish countries of destination in three different classes (EU15, Industrialized non-European countries and non-industrialized non-European countries) and we find, that exporters and FDI makers have higher probability to introduce innovation if they undertake their activities in countries outside the Europe, but, in particular and somehow surprisingly, exporting towards non-European and less developed countries raise the probability of introducing product innovation since firms have to face greater consumer heterogeneity in less-developed countries than in more developed ones, since Italian customers have more similar tastes to customers from developed countries so firms have to modify their products to meet foreign tastes.
In Chapter 3 we change our perspective considering both innovation and internationalization strategies jointly and changing the variable of interest analyzing how the persistence in innovation activity influences the performance of the firm (measured through the total factor productivity à la Levinsohn and Petrin) and if this relationship changes if firms export persistently or do not. Using OLS and then a two step system Arellano-Bond GMM, we at first consider the effects of these strategies separately, and then, we consider them jointly. What we find is that when we consider the strategies separately they do not seem to allow firms to gain productivity. Our estimation results are in favour of the hypotheses of learning-by-exporting and learning-by-doing: persistent innovation efforts must be associated with a permanent presence on foreign markets since firms that persistently innovate and persistently export have better results in terms of productivity than persistently exporting firms that do not innovate persistently and than firms that do not export persistently. [edited by Author]Obiettivo fondamentale della tesi è fornire un contributo al dibattito sulla relazione tra innovazione ed internazionalizzazione. Dopo aver fornito nel Capitolo 1 una esaustiva e completa rassegna della letteratura (teorica ed empirica) sull’argomento, nel Capitolo 2 passeremo, considerando diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione, ad analizzare l’impatto della partecipazione ad attività internazionali sull’innovazioneper fornire ulteriore evidenza empirica al filone della letteratura noto come “learning-by-internationalization” (LBI). Un ulteriore importante obiettivo di tale capitolo è considerare se le destinazioni di attività internazionali influiscono sui ritorni in termini di innovazione per le imprese. Nel capitolo conclusivo dell’elaborato, infine, esamineremo il ruolo della persistenza, sia nelle decisioni di innovazione che nell’attività di export, per vedere se un più duraturo coinvolgimento in tali attività (solo in una o in entrambi) possa assicurare un maggiore ritorno in termini di produttività. Tutte le analisi, volte al raggiungimento degli obiettivi sopracitati, sono state condotte attraverso l’utilizzo di dati sulle imprese manifatturiere italiane, osservate per un periodo di tempo di 8 anni, forniti da tre diverse wave (VIII, IX, X) dei dati Unicredit-Capitalia (19982006).
Approfondendo più nel dettaglio i contenuti dei vari capitoli che compongono l’elaborato, nel Capitolo 1, affrontiamo il dibattito, ancora aperto, che ha attraversato la letteratura nelle ultime due decadi, mettendo in risalto come progressivamente, l’oggetto di analisi si sia progressivamente spostato da un approccio più industry-level – più in voga fino alla fine degli anni ’90 del secolo scorso – verso una sempre crescente attenzione al ruolo centrale che hanno le caratteristiche specifiche delle imprese e la loro eterogeneità. Il contributo del secondo capitolo di questo elaborato, invece, non è incentrato solo sull’importanza delle esportazioni, come la maggior parte dei lavori in questo campo (per delle rassegne esaustive vedere Wagner 2007, 2012; e, per l’Italia, Gattai, 2015); uno degli
FIRM PERFORMANCES, INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES AND INNOVATION.
A MICRO LEVEL ANALYSIS ON ITALIAN FIRMS.
elementi di principale novità è aver considerato congiuntamente tre diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione: esportazioni, investimenti diretti esteri (IDE) e outsourcing. In questo capitolo, inoltre, la dimensione per valutare la performance dell’impresa e, quindi, il diverso impatto delle diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione, è l’innovazione (che noi consideriamo sia senza distinguere tra le diverse tipologie, sia anche solo come innovazione di prodotto). Le stime di questo capitolo sono state condotte attraverso l’utilizzo di tecniche econometriche complementari: partendo dall’utilizzo di stime con variabili dipendenti binarie, in particolare di probit con random effects, implementeremo il propensity score matching per affrontare i problemi di enodgeneità e di “selection bias on observables”; infine, attraverso l’utilizzo della procedura di Heckman, controlleremo eventuali “selection bias due to unobservables”. I risultati principali di questo capitolo sono: 1) sia le esportazioni che gli IDE hanno un effetto positivo sulla probabilità delle imprese di introdurre innovazione e gli IDE hanno anche un effetto maggiore, se consideriamo l’innovazione senza distinguerne le tipologie; 2) se consideriamo, invece, l’introduzione di innovazioni di prodotto, anche in questo caso, le imprese coinvolte in tale tipo di attività hanno un probabilità maggiore di innovare se confrontate con le rispettive controparti non attive sui mercati internazionali; 3) l’outsourcing, invece, mostra un coefficiente positivo e significativo solo nel caso dell’innovazione di processo, suggerendo che le imprese che esternalizzano alcune fasi della produzione possono avere un ritorno in termini di innovazione che consentirebbe loro di migliorare l’intero processo produttivo. Dato che le destinazioni delle attività internazionali possono avere effetti differenti sull’innovazione, le raggrupperemo in 3 differenti classi (i Paesi che fanno parte dell’Europa a 15, Paesi non europei industrializzati, Paesi non europei meno industrializzati). I nostri risultati sottolineano come le imprese esportatrici e che investono all’estero abbiano una maggiore probabilità, se comparate con le loro controparti non attive sui mercati internazionali, di introdurre innovazioni se le loro attività sono rivolte a Paesi al di fuori dell’Europa a 15. In particolare, risultato forse inaspettato, esportare verso Paesi non appartenenti all’Europa a 15 e meno sviluppati, sembra garantire una maggiore probabilità di introdurre innovazioni di prodotto. Questo risultato sembra sottolineare come le imprese che si rivolgono a tali mercati, a causa di una maggiore eterogeneità delle preferenze dei mercati di destinazione rispetto al mercato domestico italiano, debbano fare uno sforzo maggiore in termini di innovazione per rendere appetibili i propri prodotti.
Nel terzo ed ultimo capitolo della tesi, analizzeremo la relazione tra innovazione e internazionalizzazione sotto una diversa prospettiva. Considereremo, infatti, congiuntamente, le scelte strategiche sia in termini di innovazione che di internazionalizzazione, cambiando anche la variabile di interesse con cui misuriamo la performance delle imprese: la produttività totale dei fattori á la Levinsohn and Petrin. Oggetto di interesse di questo capitolo, in particolare, è analizzare se le performance delle imprese cambiano se le imprese intraprendono separatamente o congiuntamente le due strategie e, inoltre, se portarle avanti nel tempo in maniera continua ha effetti positivi. Analizzeremo, prima singolarmente, poi congiuntamente le diverse scelte strategiche attraverso l’utilizzo prima di un OLS e poi di un two-step system GMM á la Arellano-Bond. Quello che emerge dalla nostra analisi è che quando consideriamo le strategie separatamente,
queste non sembrano assicurare alle imprese vantaggi in termini di produttività, ma, a conferma delle ipotesi di learning-by-exporting e di learning-by-doing, le imprese che innovano costantemente nel tempo devono associare anche una costante attività di export per avere benefici. Imprese che intraprendono una sola attività, infatti, anche se costantemente nel tempo, non sembrano invece avere ritorni positivi in termini di produttività. [a cura dell'Autore]XV n.s
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