1,720,982 research outputs found
Enjoy today, because nothing is sure about tomorrow. Unintended effects of temporal debt suspension
No full textDuring the recent impactful global crises (i.e., the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the Covid- 19 global pandemic), governments promoted temporal debt suspension programs to alleviate the financial pressure on firms. However, while these programs temporarily alleviate the financial problems of the firms, they could also change firms’ behaviors, inducing a short-term orientation and so producing some unintended effects. Specifically, we argue that firms eligible to temporal debt suspension programs change their resources’ allocation, by increasing dividends payout and financial debt leverage and decreasing long-term investments. We tested our predictions by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment produced by a debt suspension program implemented in Italy after 2009 for small and medium enterprises. Overall, our findings suggest that the impact of policies designed to help eligible firms to overcome temporary financial constraints should take into account some unintended negative consequences produced by an increased short-term orientation of eligible firms
What determines firm investments? An empirical investigation on the role of local institutional quality, industry regulation and state ownership
No full textThe influence of the environment on firms’ investments has been largely investigated. Literature underlines that the national institutional quality is one of the key driver of firms’ investment strategies. It is instead, relatively unexplored, if local institutional quality may affect firms’ investments, that is if difference in institutional quality within the same country may influence firm investments. To this purpose, we collected data about a large sample of limited companies in Italy, a country characterized by significant variation of institutional quality within it. Our results show that higher local institutional quality positively influences firms’ total investments. Moreover, our results highlight that regulated industry and state- ownership moderate this relationship. In particular, we find that, when local institutional quality decreases, regulated and state-owned firms invest more than non-regulated and non- state-owned firms; the opposite is true when local institutional quality increases. These findings underline the importance of local institutional quality and the heterogeneous reaction of regulated and state-owned firms to changes in the institutional environment
«In nome del popolo sovrano». Storia breve della modernità
No full textL'evoluzione del lessema 'popolo' segna i periodi di crisi storica
When social innovations foster integral human development: evidence from the impact of theatrical activities on prison inmates’ social skills
No full textWe build on scholarly work on social innovation and social psychology to contribute to research on integral human development. This research stream builds on the ethical principles of virtue ethics and humanistic personalism to claim that organizations have the role of helping individuals develop through meaningful interaction with others. It also implicitly assumes that any initiative aimed at achieving this purpose and developing the relational dimension of marginalized individuals will have a homogenous and positive impact. We test this assumption by investigating the impact of a social innovation introduced by Opera Prison for inmates, who are a particularly marginalized category. The social innovation we study takes the form of novel theatrical activities that aim at fostering inmates’ social skills—that is, the cognitive and interpersonal abilities that are required for engaging in positive interpersonal interactions. Because participation in theatrical activities is not exogenous in our setting, we adopt an instrumental variable technique to analyze 396 questionnaires from a random sample of 178 inmates. In contrast to the assumption of integral human development, we find that engagement in theatrical activities has a heterogeneous effect, depending on the specific social skills considered and the characteristics of the inmates involved. Based on this evidence, we contribute to problematizing research on integral human development, virtue ethics, and humanistic personalism and imparting it with greater empirical traction. We also advance research on social innovations by clarifying the blurry relationship between social innovations and social impact
The dimensions of experiential learning in the management of activity load
No full textDrawing on the attention-based view of the firm and the experiential learning literature, this paper develops and tests a theory on how firms learn to cope with the strains of activity load. We first empirically test the impact of activity load on the performance of a focal activity. We then study how this relationship is moderated by four dimensions of experiential learning: stock, homogeneity, pacing, and past success. We test our hypotheses on a proprietary database of 6,913 investments by 248 private equity firms in 77 countries between 1973 and 2008. We find that heavier activity loads exact a smaller toll on performance when firms have larger and more homogeneous stocks of prior experience. However, when firms’ prior experience is more rapidly paced or successful, the toll of heavier activity loads on performance grows. Taken together, these
four dimensions of experiential learning provide an initial theoretical basis for the development of a capability that we term attention modulation capability
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
No full text“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
No full textWe 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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