1,721,007 research outputs found
Structural change and cyclical fluctuations of employment dynamics by professions in Italy
No full textThe Italian labour market has registered in the last decades a substantial growth in qualification of human capital, mainly as a consequence of both active job policies and sectorial structural changes. The composition of professional figures has changed across sectors, in favour of the more qualified ones. The driving forces can be identified in the allocation of employment from manufacturing to services and in the increase of demand of (new) services by firms and families. After a long lasting period of economic growth in the second half of nineties, the strong slowing down in output and aggregated demand registered in the three years after 2000 has drastically changed the labour market condition. In this years the variations in labour demand reflect a less positive economic trend and the decrease in consumption and activity. The effect is a reduction in the demand of more qualified professions, mainly for employment in social and health services, conditioned by the relative fall in the welfare expenditure. Associated with the employment rise in the period, an other relevant changes in composition is on work: new forms of flexible jobs appear and female employment increases. The object of this paper is to analyze the structure by professions of employment in Italy in the period 1995-2003. The focus is on the adjustment of the composition of professional employment after cyclical shocks and structural changes. The analysis intends to single out professions with higher growth rates in employment, conditioned to sectorial effects, and to investigate the effects on flexibility and qualification of total labour force. A particular attention will be dedicated to the presence of polarization in employment dynamics between high skill and low skill professions
Are the R&D Subsidies Effective? An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Fund for Technological Innovation
No full textEmpirical evidence on the effects of public subsidies to R&D at firm level is mixed and contradictory. The paper presents new empirical results based on new dataset, that integrates administrative archives with a balance sheet dataset containing longitudinal information on sales, fixed assets, value added, employment. The impact of incentives is estimated using different samples by dimension, sectors and geographic area. A DID Matching estimator is applied, considering the presence of selection on observables and non observables The results suggest the presence of significant effect on employment and investment, but not on sales and productivit
La valutazione di incentivi a consorzi di imprese: problemi di metodo
No full textIl lavoro indaga sulle metodologie per lanalisi ex ante dei progetti di investimento presentati dai consorzi di piccole e medie imprese con lintento di valutare lutilità pubblica di incentivare tali soggetti, anziché singole imprese, attraverso un processo di contrattazione tra Stato e impresa. Quali condizioni rendono opportuno lintervento dello Stato nel finanziare questi progetti? In genere, lintervento statale è giustificabile quando esistono dei vantaggi per le imprese nello stare insieme che non possono essere catturati dalla singola impresa. È un classico problema di fallimento del mercato, in presenza di un equilibrio di coordinamento superiore ad un equilibrio di tipo Nash (non collusivo), che spesso viene risolto attribuendone la soluzione (ovvero la promozione del coordinamento) alloperatore pubblico. Il caso dei consorzi può essere anchesso considerato come un problema di coordinamento di interventi privati: lazione pubblica è quindi giustificata se esistono esternalità di aggregazione per le imprese dovute alloperare in modo coordinato, ovvero allappartenenza al consorzio, che si riflettono positivamente nellarea circostante
ARE THE R&D SUBSIDIES EFFECTIVE? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS FOR ITALY
No full textBoth academic scholars and policy makers are debating the effectiveness of incentive system that boost firms' competition enhancing innovation and research and development (R&D) efforts. In the last 10 years, the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy (the objective of increasing R&D expenditure to 3% of GDP) have accelerated the growth rate of public R&D support but the sign and the size of the effects on firms’ R&D expenditure and performances is an open question. Spurred by the increasing share of public resources devoted to supporting innovation activity, a growing body of literature has investigated the effectiveness of R&D subsidies. The findings are mixed and controversial. David et al. (2000) examine the results of forty years of empirical studies and find that there is no conclusive evidence in favour of public support. The inconclusive empirical results could mainly be explained by the difficulties in isolating the impact of innovation subsidies from the confounding effects induced by other factors. In particular, participation in these programs is generally endogenous and the selection bias is pervasive. Economists and econometricians deal with the problem of inferring the effect of a policy by using different evaluation methods, depending basically on the type and quality of available data and on the policy “assignment rule’’ (Blundell-Dias, 2009). Only recently an interesting literature on econometric evaluation methods for non-experimental data; also in the field of public support to private R&D has arisen.
The paper is cast in this new stream of literature. The study analyzes the effect of public R&D subsidies on firms performance and innovative efforts in Italian industry using a counterfactual approach based on a non-experimental method. The main concern is to assess the effectiveness of public R&D support on firm’s performances analyzing whether the sign and the size of the effects depend on the size of the firms and on its technological level. We want evaluate two policy instruments: The Fund for Technological Innovation (FTI), that is the specific policy instrument used to subsidize private projects on R&D, and the IIP (Innovation Integrated Programmes), financing both private capital and innovation investment. It is the first time that a counterfactual analysis considers also IIP. Both the instruments allocate subsidies on the basis of a technical selection among projects of competing firms. The study compare subsidized firms with non subsidized ones using a counterfactual approach based on a MDID (Matching Differences-in Differences) estimator. The empirical analysis is carried on a new detailed and informative database including companies awarded at least one R&D grant during the years 2000-2006; for each company we have data on the size of subsidies, from the administrative archive, and balance sheet data from balance sheet database. We estimate the impact of the subsidies on revenues, material and immaterial investment, value added, employment, labour productivity and profitability
Structural change of employment dynamics by professions and regions in Italy
No full textThe Italian labour market has registered in the last decades a substantial growth in the qualification of human capital, mainly as a consequence of both active job policies and sectorial structural changes. The composition of professional figures has changed across sectors, in favour of the more qualified ones. The object of this paper is to analyse the structure by professions of employment in Italy in the period 1993-2003. The focus is on the adjustment of the composition of professional employment after cyclical shocks and structural changes. The analysis singles out professions with higher growth rates in employment, conditioned to sectorial effects, idiosyncratic trend and cyclical fluctuations. A particular attention is dedicated to the presence of polarization in employment dynamics between high skill and low skill professions
A counterfactual evaluation of the spatial effects of public subsidies using a spatial propensity score matching approach
No full textThe focus of our paper is the identification of the regional effects of industrial subsidies when the presence of subsidized firms is spatially correlated. We propose a novel “spatial propensity score matching” technique that allow to correct for the spatial bias. The propensity score is estimated by an instrumental variable spatial approach applied to a probit model. The empirical analysis is based on a dataset that incorporates information on incentives to private capital accumulation by Law 488/92, mainly devoted to SME, and Planning Contracts, created for large projects. The analysis is carried out on a disaggregated territorial level, using the grid of the local labour system in Italy. The results show that the impact of subsidies on regional employment is larger if controlling for the presence of spatial effects. Spillover effects for value added and productivity are modest. Therefore the empirical analysis suggests the presence of some spatial crowding out of the programs in the labour market, where subsidized areas attract employment from neighbourhoods
- …
