1,720,979 research outputs found
Urban Wage Premia, Cost of Living, and Collective Bargaining
No full textIn this paper, we estimate the urban wage premia (UWP) in Italy, with its economy characterized by the interplay between collective bargaining and spatial heterogeneity in the cost of living. We implement a reduced-form regression analysis using both nominal and real (in temporalandspatialterms)wages. Ourdatasetforthe2005-2015periodincludes,forworkers’ characteristics,uniqueadministrativedataprovidedbyItalianSocialSecurityInstituteand, for the local CPI computation, housing prices collected by Italian Revenue Agency. For employees covered by collective bargaining, we find a zero UWP in nominal terms and a negative and non-negligible UWP in real terms (-5%). To capture the role played by centralized wage settings, we also consider various groups of self-employed workers, who are not covered by nationallabouragreements,whilelivinginthesamelocationsandenjoyingthesameamenities as employees. We find that the UWP for self-employed workers are up to 25 times greater thanforemployees. Moreover,sortingprovesmorenotableinthecaseofself-employedworkers, i.e. the larger UWP provide the higher incentives for high-skilled individuals and better firms to locate in cities. Our findings are confirmed on extending the analysis along the wage distribution
Co-evolution of politics and corporate governance
No full textIn the OECD countries, there exists a negative cross-country correlation between an economy's degree of employment protection and its degree of corporate ownership dispersion. One explanation is that employees’ political rights influence corporate governance: systems characterized by strong employees’ rights tend to be balanced by strong and concentrated owners. In this approach, the separation between ownership and control is only possible when unions and social democratic parties are sufficiently weak. In this paper we argue that causation runs also in the opposite direction (from strong concentrated ownership to strong employees’ protection) and leads to multiple equilibria characterized by alternative co-evolution paths of politics and corporate governance. To empirically assess our theoretical arguments we estimate a simultaneous equation model for workers rights’ protection and corporate ownership structure determination by three-stage least squares in a sample of 21 OECD countries. We conclude by arguing that the relative relevance of each flow of causation has important economic policy implications
Law, human capital, and the emergence of free city-states in medieval Italy
Full text linkIn this paper, we study how the birth of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of the Italian free cities-states (the commune) in the period 1000-1300 a.d. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that after the foundation of a new university the distance between each city in the sample and the university negatively predicts the timing of the birth of communal institutions in the city. Our evidence is consistent with the idea that universities in the Middle Ages provided the necessary juridical knowledge and skills to build legal capacity and develop broader-based institutions
Sierra Leone's National Export Strategy: Implementation Issues and Recommendations
No full textThis report concentrates on the development of an overall strategy for promoting export growth in Sierra Leone
Survey of the Literature on Successful Strategies and Practices for Export Promotion by Developing Countries
No full textIncreasing exports ranks among the highest priorities of any government in both developed and developing countries. The reason is that favouring domestic export performance is predicted to be conducive to economic growth (for reviews of the empirical literature on the relation between export and growth see Giles and Williams (2000) and Harrison and Rodríguez-Clare (2009); see also UNCTAD (2008b)). Export promotion policies (EPPs) are the set of policies and practices aimed at directly or indirectly supporting export in a given country. Export promotion policies have been widely used by most countries around the world for a long time. Reviewing the past and present international experiences with EPPs and assessing the effectiveness of the different policies is hence crucial to provide governments in developing countries with some guidelines to help identify the best practices so far. This is the objective of the present paper. The term EPP may encompass a large set of policy interventions, ranging from exchange rate policies (Bhagwati 1988) to any ‘specific measures that generally amount to the government bearing a portion of the private cost of production of export’ (OECD 1984). In general EPPs involve all the measures and programmes aimed at assisting current and potential exporters. These measures may be addressed to either national exporters or multinational enterprises producing locally (or both). Yet, in the last decades the set of policies and measures available to governments to influence exporting has been gradually restricted by the WTO. For instance, the use of selective export subsidies is now severely limited for most countries. Nonetheless, WTO rules do not prohibit all types of EPPs. Policies are still allowed when they promote (a) domestic investment in research and development, (b) regional development, (c) environment friendly activities. Notably, these may be useful instruments to increase export quality and export diversification. As we will argue below, it is crucial to consider the present and future constraints when discussing the available options for developing countries in designing their own EPPs
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
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