1,720,963 research outputs found
Family business investor buyouts: the Italian case
No full textFamily business succession is often viewed by academics and practitioners as a critical step in the life of a firm: it can affect a variety of matters, ranging from its competitive potential and its hierarchy to its own capability to survive. This is particularly true in Italy, where firms are by and large small or medium, with no direct access to the capital market, and where many entrepreneurs who actively took part in the industrial development of the second half of the 20th century are now giving up their jobs. In this paper we try to understand whether Private Equity can be an effective answer to this emerging issue or not. To this end, at this first stage of the research, we focused on those Italian deals where the Private Equity investor was heavily involved (meaning that it acquired at least a majority stake in the target family firm) and we examined the effect of the deal performances of firms (comparing the performance two years before and three years after the deal). The sample includes 21 of the 44 family business investor buyouts (FBIBO) carried out in Italy during the 1990s. The results are ambivalent. Some of the identified variables (such as Turnover, EBITDA, ...) are not statistically significant, meaning that performance trends before and after the deal cannot be tracked back to the role of the Private Equity investor. Case study analysis thus becomes more relevant. In the attempt to identify some pattern of behaviour, we clustered the firms according to their trends in Turnover and EBITDA margin (both adjusted by industry). This categorization gave some interesting results. Generally, PE intervention causes a discontinuity in the life of a firm, generating a shift in performance trends: from bad to good and vice versa. This result wasn’t expected, considering that target firms belonged mainly to mature business and that existing management was kept in place. Almost a third of the analyzed firms achieved very good performances after the PE investment, while another third displayed some signs of failure. In the middle, some mixed situations emerged, where growth was reached at the expense of profitability or where profitability was increased as growth diminished
L'impatto dei Private equity sulle performance delle imprese familiari: il caso italiano
No full textIl nostro lavoro cerca di evidenziare le specificità delle operazioni di PE in Italia e di verificarne le conseguenze sulle performance delle imprese. In particolare, l’analisi è focalizzata su un campione di operazioni di maggioranza che hanno interessato imprese familiari tra il 1995 e il 2003. Le performance aziendali, rilevate sulla base della rielaborazione dei dati di bilancio, sono state osservate per sei anni, da due prima dell’operazione a tre dopo. Nell’insieme, la nostra evidenza supporta la tesi che i PE siano in grado di generare sviluppo e reddito anche nelle imprese familiari, sebbene il quadro sia piuttosto differenziato. In particolare, dalla cluster analysis emerge come i PE tendano ad accelerare le tendenze in atto nelle aziende acquisite, contribuendo a migliorare ulteriormente le performance delle imprese già in fase di crescita e a deteriorare quelle delle aziende che presentano qualche difficoltà
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
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