1,720,969 research outputs found
State-Owned Private Equity Funds Investing in “National Champions”: The Case of Italy
No full textDespite the recent upsurge of scientific work on the Sovereign Wealth Funds’(SWFs) phenomenon, little is known on the role played in a country’s economy by a subcategory of SWFs: Strategic Funds (“SFs”). As an explicit form of governmental intervention in the economic system associated with a new model of State capitalism, SFs acquire strategic (equity) stakes in enterprises of national interest with the purpose of enhancing the home country’s growth and competitiveness. The aim of this article is to investigate the rationale, public policy objectives and investment strategies pursued by SFs, thus contributing to the SWF literature in three ways. First, we provide a definition of State-Owned Private Equity (SOPE) as referred to the activity of SFs and develop a conceptual framework to strategically position them within the PE industry. Second, we conduct a peer analysis of SFs operated by European national governments on the basis of which we propose a taxonomy of such PE entities classified into competitive and defensive ones. Third, we discuss how a SF can contribute to enhancing the competitiveness of the home country through amelioration of its macroeconomic fundamentals (e.g., value added, employment) associated with the adequate management of portfolio companies. To do so, we illustrate the case study of the SF operated by the Italian government, named as Fondo Strategico Italiano (FSI)
MARKET STRUCTURE IN ITALIAN ELECTRICITY MARKETS
No full textFollowing Directive 96/92/EC for energy sector liberalization, Italian legislation (Law 79/99) envisaged a breakdown of the vertically integrated monopolist system, the Italian State Company ENEL, with complete unbundling of an Independent System Operator and the creation of three GENCO to be sold to the private market. The Italian electricity market (IPEX), which is the most recent Pool market to be created in Europe, is now organized as a Pool system, managed by a market operator (GME) that collects the bids, determines the merit order for the dispatch of electricity and is responsible for all auxiliary services; demand-side bidding was introduced in January 2005. The key features of these changes were: i) the privatization and restructuring of the existing vertically integrated monopolistic supplier; ii) exchange organization of physical electricity in competitive wholesale spot markets through auctions. Competition was introduced at the retail level while transmission/distribution, which were still considered natural monopolies, remained under government regulation. This reorganization of the industry led to a separation of potentially competitive elements from natural monopolies. This new form of regulation has raised concerns about the ability of electricity producers to exercise market power and its effects on the efficiency of the market. A lot of studies have focused on the unilateral exercise of market power, but little attention has been devoted to analyze collusive attempts to exercise market power in a dynamic context (seminal paper are: Borenstein and Bushnell, 1999; Borenstein et al., 2002; Joskow and Kahn, 2002;Wolak, 2000, 2003; Wolfram, 1998, 1999). Finalli, only few studies have been devoted to analyze collusive attempts to exercise market power in a dynamic context (e.g. Puller, 2000; Fabra and Toro 2005; Bushnell et al. 2008).
In this paper we analyze a time series of hourly prices in the Italian electricity markets from the beginning of the market, April 2004 until, 2009. This is the first comprehensive empirical study of the Italian market, using availability of detailed data on price changes, firms’ market shares and cost fluctuations, which analyzes potential attempts to exercise market power in a dynamic context, identifying Cournot competition and collusion behavior
INTEGRATION AND CONVERGENCE IN EUROPEAN ELECTRICITY MARKETS
No full textThe liberalization process of electricity markets in Europe is more than a decade old. In the meantime, mergers and restructuring of big players in generations at the international level make likely that decisions and price strategies are taken simultaneously on several markets, based on a common set of available information. There is large evidence that organized electricity spot markets are far from the ideal competitive model and therefore all sorts of behaviors and shocks may influence price formation in those markets, ranging from international fuel price, local meteo, and local market power behavioral shocks. Several important institutional similarities exist among European electricity markets (market design and homogenous regulation of cross-border trade) but several important differences exist among European electricity markets in the physical (number and size of generation units) and technological structure (sources of electricity generation) of their generation industries. In this context several authors have wondered whether market outcomes can confirm the success of the reforms with respect to the EU's common market policy. Bower (2002) finds that some European electricity markets (especially the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and its neighbors) were already integrated to a certain extent by 2001. Boisseleau (2004) underlines that the level of integration of European markets is quite low. Armstrong and Galli (2005) highligth that European electricity prices (France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain) converged from 2002 to 2004. Finally Turkey (2006) provided empirical evidence for the insufficient correlation of flows and price analyzing Anglo-French Interconnector. In this respect, we think that we are setting forth a weaker assumption on market behavior, for we simply assume that it is rational for suppliers and buyers to adjust their behavior according to available information. Given the previous rather weak assumption, we think that for a rational agent the most efficient way to process and incorporate information in his own decision mechanism is to take into account all relevant information available. So we consider at the same time natural and necessary to use the entire dataset about the hourly price setting. In this paper we use data about four major European electricity pool markets: Austria, Germany, France and Italy for the 2004 2010 period
Concurrent design and manufacturing: an approach for the injection mould industry
No full textJardim-Goncales, Roy & Steiger-Garcao eds., Swets & Zeitlinge
Contagion in electricity markets: empirical evidences from Italian markets
No full textThis paper investigates the existence of contagion effects in electricity markets. The concept of contagion has been developed for high frequency financial markets, see the World Bank definition(Word Bank, 2000). Following Pick (2005) and Pesaran - Pick (2007) the paper presents a canonical, econometric model of contagion and investigates the conditions under which contagion can be distinguished from mere interdependence. The theoretical and empirical distinction between contagion and interdependence is based upon precise identification conditions, discussed in the paper. The empirical analysis is based on different regional markets in the Italian Power Exchange (IPX) and we focus only on pure contagion relationship in the IPX at the Italian regional level. This is a novel result in economic literature. The analysis and identification of contagion requires that each individual market equations contains market specific regressors, consequently we have to involve market specific variables in structural equations in order to correctly specify the model. Pesaran - Pick (2007, p. 1266) show that ignoring endogeneity and interdependence can introduce a substantial upward bias in estimation of contagion coefficient. In general, problems of endogeneity requires usage of instrumental variables (IV)estimation and, in agreement with Pick (2005), we obtain consistency by including regional market specific fundamentals. The most important conclusions of this paper are that contagion can be identified separately from interdependence and that effects are asymmetric
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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