1,721,012 research outputs found
On the Link between Firms and Sources of Information and Cooperation: The Case of German Manufacturing Firms
No full text
Do Innovation and Offshoring Make a Difference? An Empirical Exploration of the Effects on the Performance of European Firms
No full textThis study attempts to answer the question of whether European manufacturing firms that undertake offshoring, innovation or both benefit from higher productivity and profitability. From a methodological point of view, the driving forces that push firms to innovate and/or to offshore can be seen as self-selection mechanisms that make the estimation of their economic impact more difficult if the confounding factors affecting these mechanisms also affect the economic performance of the firms. To disentangle the effect of both offshoring and innovation on firms’ performances from the effect of firm characteristics, the propensity score matching methodology in a multi-overlapping treatment setting is used. The study targets European countries using the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-Unicredit dataset. Decisions to offshore and innovate do not seem to have a significant effect on productivity, whereas the decision to innovate only has a significant effect on firm profitability
A Composite Inter-Temporal Economic Insecurity Index
Full text linkInterest in the study of economic insecurity has grown in recent years. However, the ongoing debate about how to measure it remains unresolved. On the assumption that economic insecurity is related both to the forward-looking perception of future outcomes based on past experience and to the perception of one’s own situation compared to others in the present, we propose a class of objective individual composite inter-temporal indices of economic insecurity. The indices are obtained by combining two components, one longitudinal and one cross-sectional. In order to combine the two components, we propose a novel method that takes advantage of the availability of subjective self-assessments of one’s own economic conditions. The composite inter-temporal index is applied to the European Union-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) Longitudinal Dataset, encompassing a selection of European countries. Our analysis shows that the proposed class provides new insights into individual perceptions of well-being that are not captured by poverty and inequality measures. It also provides individual measures that can be used to study the relationship between economic insecurity and other phenomena
Outsourcing and Firm Performance: Evidence from the Italian Manufacturing Industry
No full textThis study presents an empirical analysis of the production outsourcing effect on firm productivity and
profitability in the Italian manufacturing industry. This study uses firm-level panel data that were developed by
the Italian National Statistical Institute. Using different estimation strategies, we develop panel data models and
correct for possible endogeneity bias of the outsourcing with respect to the target variables. We find a
non-significant effect of outsourcing on profitability and a significant negative effect of outsourcing on
productivity
Small Area Estimation of Inequality Measures
No full textIn order to estimate inequality measures at local level, small area
estimation methods may be used to improve the reliability of estimates when the
sample size is low. Small area models specified at area level, incorporate the design
based estimates (direct estimates) as inputs, that are typically unbiased even though
unreliable for small samples. Nevertheless, in the case of inequality measures,
design based estimates are instead known to be biased for small sample sizes. In this
work we focus on the search for a correction that can produce approximately
unbiased direct estimators, taking into account the complexity of the survey design.
We use data taken from the EU-SILC sample survey for Italy in 2013. Those
modified estimators can then be used in small areas models
A micro-econometric analysis of the antipoverty effect of social cash transfers in Italy
No full textWe analyze the anti-poverty effect of social cash transfers using a micro-econometric approach.
Aggregate analyses, based on comparing average poverty indicators before and after public transfers,
fail to address who receives the transfers and how the transfers are distributed among the poor. We
consider three dichotomous outcome variables: (i) poverty status before the receipt of transfers; (ii)
the receipt of transfers; and (iii) poverty status after the receipt of transfers. We use a trivariate probit
model with sample selection, connecting the outcome variables to the characteristics of the household
and its head. Our empirical results highlight that the Italian social transfers system overprotects certain
household typologies at the expense of others, as social transfers are primarily awarded to employees
with permanent positions and the elderly, while the system is not generous enough to large households
with dependant children, the self-employed, temporary contract workers, and the unemployed
Hierarchical Bayes multivariate estimation of poverty rates based on increasing thresholds for small domains
No full textA model-based small area method for calculating estimates of poverty rates based on
different thresholds for subsets of the Italian population is proposed. The subsets are
obtained by cross-classifying by household type and administrative region. The suggested
estimators satisfy the following coherence properties: (i) within a given area, rates
associated with increasing thresholds are monotonically increasing; (ii) interval estimators
have lower and upper bounds within the interval (0, 1); (iii) when a large domain-specific
sample is available the small area estimate is close to the one obtained using standard
design-based methods; (iv) estimates of poverty rates should also be produced for domains
for which there is no sample or when no poor households are included in the sample.
A hierarchical Bayesian approach to estimation is adopted. Posterior distributions are
approximated by means of MCMC computation methods. Empirical analysis is based on
data from the 2005 wave of the EU-SILC survey
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