1,721,064 research outputs found
Unbundling technology adoption and tfp at the firm level. Do intangibles matter?
No full textWe use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate production function parameters allowing, within each sector, for the existence of multiple technologies. We find that intangible assets both push the firm towards better technologies (technology adoption effects) and allow for a more efficient exploitation of a given technology (tfp effects)
Measuring Productivity
No full textQuantifying productivity is a conditio sine qua non for empirical analysis in a number of research fields. The identification of the measure that best fits with the specific goals of the analysis, as well as being data-driven, is currently complicated by the fact that an array of methodologies is available. This paper provides economic researchers with an up-to-date overview of issues and relevant solutions associated with this choice. Methods of productivity measurement are surveyed and classified according to three main criteria: i) macro/micro; ii) frontier/non-frontier; iii) deterministic/econometric
Italy’s Productivity Conundrum. A Study on Resource Misallocation in Italy.
No full textThis paper provides a detailed analysis of the patterns of misallocation in Italy since the early 1990s.
In particular, we show that the extent of misallocation has substantially increased since 1995, and that
this increase can account for a large fraction of the Italian productivity slowdown since then.
We gather evidence on the evolution of firm level misallocation both within and between various
categories of firms, in particular those based on geographic areas, industries, and firm size classes. We
do so both for firms in manufacturing and for firms in non-manufacturing. Overall, looking at the
distribution of firm productivity, we uncover a thickening of the left tail as the share of firms with low
productivity has increased over the period. This implies not only a decrease in average firm
productivity, but also an increase in its dispersion.
We show that the increase in misallocation has come mainly from higher dispersion of productivities
within different firm size classes and geographical areas rather than between them. Crucially, we
highlight that rising misallocation has hit firm categories that are traditionally the spearhead of the
Italian economy such as firms in the Northwest and big firms. We also produce evidence that, while
the 2008 crisis seems to have triggered, at least until 2013, a ‘cleansing effect’ of the least productive
firms in the manufacturing sector as a whole, in non-manufacturing industries one observes the
survival of firms with even lower productivities than they used to have.
Finally, we propose a novel methodology to assess which firm characteristics are more strongly
associated with misallocation. In particular, we investigate the role of corporate ownership/control
and governance, finance, workforce composition, internationalisation, cronyism and innovation.
Together with the other findings already highlighted, the analysis of those ‘markers’ provides the
ground for a policy-oriented discussion on how to tackle the Italian productivity slowdown
Company profits in Italy
No full textWe provide insights into the macro and microeconomic underpinnings of company profitability
developments in Italy. We show that the average ROA (returns on assets) of Italian companies declined
slightly between 1993 and 2005 and then contracted sharply during the economic crisis before starting a
slow recovery in 2013. While the pattern in Italy before 2009 was very similar to the pattern in Germany;
during the crisis it became more similar to the pattern in Spain, with both countries performing relatively
worse than Germany and France. This decline appears to be attributable to a fall in productivity, rather than
a rise in labour costs. Indeed, notwithstanding the substantial deterioration that began in 2000, unit labour
costs (labour costs over value added) in Italy are still lower than in Germany, France and Spain. Within
Italy, we document large cross-sectional differences. Micro firms and firms located in the South are tend to
exhibit the lowest ROA, while the ROA of firms from the North-West dropped dramatically between the
mid-1990s and 2010. Interestingly, firms with the highest innovation intensity (measured by intangibles
over total assets) tend not to have the highest ROA, particularly if they are small and operating in low-tech
and/or low competition sectors. We interpret our results in terms of ‘active’ (based on innovation and
higher expenditure on intermediate goods and labour) and ‘passive’ (based on cost control) business
models, with the latter exemplified by domestic and usually small-sized and family-owned firms. From this
perspective, subsidising innovation could treat the symptom rather than the disease. Instead, medium-tolong
term policies should focus on increasing the share of firms with ‘active’ business models. Our
econometric analysis suggests possible instruments: increasing the efficiency of the market for corporate
control; reducing the government ownership of firms; increasing the degree of competition in sectors where
barriers are still present; and improving the effectiveness of the education system to raise the human capital
endowment available to businesses
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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