1,721,016 research outputs found
Terroir wines, mafia's externalities and death awareness: three essays in experimental economics and accounting
Full text linkThis doctoral thesis is composed by three research papers.
The first chapter, titled "Terroir and Perceived Quality of Wine: Evidence from Tasting Experiments", is co-authored with Luca Nunziata.
In this study we use experimental data in order to verify whether information about the terroir of a wine has a causal effect on the perceived wine quality and whether these pieces of information are more effective than the quality signal used for terroir products in the wine market: appellation (label) of origin. In order to address these issues we have carried out two wine-tasting experiments in three different shopping malls in Italy, using a random sample of 790 individuals. We used a Palizzi IGT red wine as it was awarded for its terroir expressiveness and it is an appellation not well known to consumers. Wine consumers in our samples are found to be able to use technical and detailed information about terroir to infer the quality of the wine and they exhibit a higher appreciation when receiving information about terroir rather than about the appellation of origin Palizzi IGT.
The second chapter is titled "Criminal Firms: Exploring Negative Externalities on Non-Criminal Competitors" and it is co-authored with Antonio Parbonetti and Michele Fabrizi.
The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the economic consequences due to the presence of firms connected with mafia-type criminal organizations located in developed areas. In particular, we verify for the first time how these criminal firms affect non-criminal
competitors’ performance and we investigate the negative externalities that they inflict by using firm-level data. Our empirical analysis exploits exogenous shocks imposed by operations against Mafia (from 2008 to 2011) at municipality level to implement a difference-in-difference strategy that compares the change in performance of non-criminal firms with the change in performance of a control group of (non-criminal) firms that operate in either an industry or a municipality that have not been affected by these police operations. . The underlying idea is that these operations‘clean’ the industries and the municipalities where the targeted criminal firms operate, with a consequent beneficial effect on non-criminal competitors located in the geographical proximity. Results suggest that treated competitors experience a statistically significant and sizeable increase in EBITDA/Total Assets and ROA after the operation, with respect to comparison groups that have not been exposed to this shock. Further explorations permit us to verify that this positive effect is not merely due to a decrease in the industry size after the operations. Organized crime and criminal firms bring inefficiencies in the institutional and business environment that cause many distortions, such as in the access to procurement markets, especially for smaller firms.
The third chapter, "Does Thinking About Death Make Us More Generous? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Cooperation with UNICEF", is a solo paper.
In this study I draw on Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Terror Management Theory (TMT) to expand our understanding of the phenomenon of ingroup bias in charitable giving. I aim at
investigating the effect of the use of death priming in emotive charity advertisement on potential donors’ decisions and ingroup bias. In particular I compare implicit and explicit priming of death thoughts against priming of thoughts related to disease and I explore the role of various dimensions of subjects' self-esteem in moderating their responses to implicit stimuli. To this purpose I conduct a field experiment in cooperation with UNICEF, which has involved 547 subjects. Main findings of this study show that in the control group we observe that on average ingroup bias is in favor of ingroup (white-skinned - Caucasian) recipients, rather than outgroup (black-skinned - African) ones. When thoughts of death are activated, both implicitly and explicitly, discriminatory behavior emerges at the expense of donors' ingroup and favorable towards the outgroup. Furthermore, implicit death effects arise independently from the level of
general self-esteem and self-esteem’s relevant domains. This study produces interesting findings not only for the direct field of application. The integration of SIT and TMT offers valuable sparks for forthcoming economic analyses of ingroup bias in different settings
Caratteristiche e modalità di gestione delle aziende criminali
Full text linkIl presente lavoro analizza le principali caratteristiche e le modalità di gestione delle aziende apparentemente legali ma di fatto connesse alla criminalità organizzata (aziende criminali). In particolare, sono state oggetto di studio le aziende criminali localizzate nel Centro-Nord Italia che sono state interessate da operazioni di polizia nel decennio 2005-2014. L’analisi evidenzia che le aziende criminali sono in media più grandi, più indebitate e meno liquide di quelle non criminali. È stata, inoltre, individuata un’interessante variabilità nel campione che rivela l’esistenza di tre tipologie di aziende criminali denominate: di Supporto, Cartiere e Star. Le prime hanno una dimensione in media piccola e svolgono una funzione di supporto alle organizzazioni criminali. Le seconde assolvono il compito di riciclare denaro sporco mediante scambi apparentemente commerciali, mentre le Star, caratterizzate da performance elevate, possono essere utilizzate per infiltrare il tessuto politico e sociale.
Parole chiave: Crimine Organizzato, Mafia, Performance, Aziende Criminali, Gestione delle Aziende
In this study we aim at investigating the phenomenon of the Mafia infiltration in apparently legal firms (criminal firms), by analyzing their main characteristics. We focus our attention on criminal firms located in Central and Northern Italy, which have been targeted by a police operation (and by subsequent judicial procedures) during the decade 2004-2015. Our analysis shows that Mafia organizations do not use companies only to launder the resources accumulated through illicit activities. Specifically, criminal firms are on average larger, have more debt and lower liquidity than non-criminal ones. Furthermore, we have identified an interesting variability in our sample that reveals the existence of three different types of criminal firms that respond to different needs of the criminal organization. A first group is composed by small firms, which appear to not carry out any productive activity and that are used to support the organization. Then we tracked a second group of small and medium-sized enterprises, which launder money according to the ‘classic’ method. Finally, there are large firms that record high levels of performance and are very similar to ‘clean’ and profitable firms. These firms seem to meet more complex needs related to the establishment of connections with other companies and the infiltration of the political and social spheres.
Keywords: Organized crime, Mafia, Performance, Criminal Firms, Corporate Governanc
Anti‐mafia police actions, criminal firms, and peer firm tax avoidance
Full text linkMafia firms introduce distortions in the markets in which they operate, increasing the cost of doing business for peer firms. We investigate whether peers respond by increasing their tax avoidance and thus increasing funds available to compete with the Mafia firms. Using a sample of Italian anti-Mafia police actions that resulted in the removal of Mafia firms and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that peers reduce their tax avoidance following these actions. We further show that, following anti-Mafia police actions, peer firms improve their performance and increase capital investment while enjoying a reduction in the cost of raw materials. Overall, our results highlight the micro-level channels through which Mafia can affect firm outcomes and local economies
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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