Economic crisis and firm exit: do intangibles matter?

The crisis regarding the Euro area has caused several business closures, especially in the periphery of the EMU. In this paper we use an orginal Italian firm-level dataset to determine why firms exit the market during times of economic crisis, paying particular attention to the role of intangibles. We argue that intangibles strenghten a firm's resilience, which improves the firm's ability to cope with adverse events and unexpected shocks. We obtain two main results: first, we show that the presence of intangibles significantly reduces the probability of firm exit, especially during the initial phase of the crisis, second, we find that financial constraints become more relevant than intangibles in explaining firm exit during the latest stages of the crisis. Thus, the process of firm selection during the crisis has undergone a rapid transformation, with distorsions that may lead even skilled firms to exit. Implications of these findings for EU recovery policies are discussed

Swimming upstream throughout the turmoil: evidence on firm growth during the Great recession

In contrast to the so-called cleansing effect, during the Great Recession we observe highly heterogeneous firm performances. In particular, a not negligible subset of firms grew considerably despite of the general tendency towards downsizing. In this paper we explain the behaviour of theseswimming upstream firms(SUFs). We obtain three main results. First, SUFs exhibitcertainfirm-specific characteristics: they are younger and relatively more productive than non-SUFs. Second, SUFs adopt highly proactive strategic profiles, which assignsignificant importancetoactivities related to innovation, intangibles and internationalization. Third, SUFs tend to react to changes in market opportunities, although they suffer from sticky processes of resourcereallocation between exiting and surviving firms. Moreover, their growth seems to take place primarily within a regime of cumulative destruction rather thancreative destruction. Some of the implications of these results for managers and policy makers are discussed

IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

In recent years, the ethnic entrepreneurship has assumed a role of major importance in Italy. Firms managed by immigrants are a significant part of Italian business world, but they are also an opportunity for exchange between populations of different origin, an opportunity for social mobility, the search for autonomy (individual and group) and, in some circumstances, a factor strengthening social cohesion. Not a few, finally, are the experiences that provide for their involvement in transnational initiatives and projects in co-development. This panel session has explored the issue and provided an update on the state of the art research with several contributions by scholars working in the Italian universities, according to different disciplinary approache

La trasformazione silenziosa. Cambiamento strutturale e strategie d'impresa nella industria italiana.

Intorno alla meta degli anni novanta alcuni cambiamenti che si stavano sviluppando da tempo nell’industria manifatturiera, secondo dinamiche autonome e percorsi distinti, improvvisamente subiscono una accelerazione e tendono a convergere verso un nuovo modello di produzione. Le caratteristiche essenziali del nuovo paradigma sono l’emergere di un complesso produttivo di natura globale, policentrico sul piano geografico e fortemente interdipendente. Si consolidano, inoltre, forme concorrenziali basate su vantaggi competitivi temporanei che accrescono la volatilità dei mercati e l’instabilità delle traiettorie tecnologiche. Contemporaneamente viene abbandonato un tratto decisivo del precedente modello manifatturiero: si rinuncia alla standardizzazione dei prodotti a favore della ricerca di soluzioni di massima personalizzazione. Questi elementi e soprattutto la loro combinazione rappresentano le novità di maggior rilievo del mutamento in corso e nello stesso tempo definiscono lo sfondo su cui si proietta l’evoluzione recente del manifatturiero italiano. I segnali della partecipazione del sistema produttivo nazionale a questi processi erano e sono visibili - prima fra tutti la capacità di basare le esportazioni su una elevata e qualitativamente significativa capacità di differenziazione del prodotto - anche se talvolta si manifestano con tendenze di natura contrastanti. Tali evidenze comunque non sempre sono state raccolte e discusse, preferendo molti analisti ribadire la più semplice e consolatoria profezia del ‘declino’. La conseguenza è stata che si è trascurato di segnalare l’affiorare e il materializzarsi di una forte eterogeneità delle condotte di impresa che ha preso la forma di una ‘trasformazione silenziosa’ del paesaggio industriale italiano. Questo volume – che raccoglie contributi di studiosi di formazione e di interessi di ricerca diversi - cerca di fornire qualche elemento di riflessione per comprendere le traiettorie del rinnovamento e tentare di identificare i soggetti e le forze che ne saranno parte attiva (e quelli che tendenzialmente ne verranno esclusi)

Acculturation and Ethnic Hybridism in Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Received literature describes ethnic firms as founded to meet the needs of an ethnic community and use peculiar configurations of human and social capital drawing on ethnic resources. According to some authors, this is due to the \u201cacculturation lag\u201d that characterizes immigrant entrepreneurs retaining traditional values from the heritage culture. Recent evidence however shows that immigrant firms are undergoing significant changes in their organizational structures, such as the incorporation of native or non-co-ethnic partners or employees (i.e., firm ethnic hybridism). This study analyzes whether these changes are accompanied by different entrepreneurs\u2019 acculturation patterns. A unique set of primary data about 130 first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs in Italy is used to shed some new light on this topic and suggest avenues for future research

Beyond the enclave? Break-outs into mainstream markets and multicultural hybridism in ethnic firms

The literature on immigrant entrepreneurship has richly described the characteristics and peculiarities of ethnic businesses catering to enclave markets. However, several indications suggest that immigrant-owned firms are increasingly entering mainstream markets and changing both their internal structures and their external networks with resource providers. One of the most substantial changes, which has been overlooked by researchers, consists of the appearance of what we define as \u2018multiculturally hybrid firms\u2019, which are firms that rely on inter-ethnic managerial or labour resources to carry out their activities. Therefore, in this paper we provide an understanding of the variables that affect the recourse to solutions of multicultural hybridism in the entrepreneurial teams and personnel of immigrant-owned firms. We conduct our empirical analyses on data collected through interviews on a sample of 130 immigrant entrepreneurs in Italy. Our results show that multicultural hybridism is mainly driven by the size of the founding team, the business's maturity, the entrepreneurs' host-country language competence and by entrepreneurs' motivation by individual goals rather than community goals. This research advances our knowledge about immigrant entrepreneurship by focusing on firm-level dimensions such as the diversity of entrepreneurial teams and employees, which are increasingly relevant in our multicultural societies

Networks of superconducting nano-puddles in 1/8 doped YBa2Cu3O6.5+y controlled by thermal manipulation

While it is known that the nature and the arrangement of defects in complex oxides have an impact on the material functionalities little is known on control of superconductivity by oxygen interstitial organization in cuprates. Here we report direct compelling evidence for the control of Tc, by manipulation of the superconducting granular networks of nanoscale puddles, made of ordered oxygen stripes, in a single crystal of YBa2Cu3O6.5+y with average formal hole doping p close to 1/8. Upon thermal treatments we were able to switch from a first network of oxygen defects striped puddles with OVIII modulation (qOVIII(a*)=(h+3/8,k,0) and qOVIII(a*)=(h+5/8,k,0)), to second network characterized by OXVI modulation (qOXVI(a*)=(h+7/16,k,0) and qOXVI(a*)=(h+9/16,k,0)), and finally to a third network with puddles of OV periodicity (qOV(a*)=(4/10,1,0) and qOV(a*)=(6/10,1,0)). We map the microscopic spatial evolution of the out of plane OVIII, OXVI and OV puddles nano-size distribution via scanning micro-diffraction measurements. In particular, we calculated the number of oxygen chains (n) and the charge density (holes concentration p) inside each puddle, analyzing areas of 160x80 {\mu}m2, and recording 12800 diffraction patterns to reconstruct each spatial map. The high spatial inhomogeneity shown by all the reconstructed spatial maps reflects the intrinsic granular structure that characterizes cuprates and iron-chalcogenides, disclosing the presence of several complex networks of coexisting superconducting domains with different lattice modulations, charge density and different gaps like in the proposed multi-gaps scenario called superstripes.Comment: 5 figure

The effect of internal pressure on the tetragonal to monoclinic structural phase transition in ReOFeAs: the case of NdOFeAs

We report the temperature dependent x-ray powder diffraction of the quaternary compound NdOFeAs (also called NdFeAsO) in the range between 300 K and 95 K. We have detected the structural phase transition from the tetragonal phase, with P4/nmm space group, to the orthorhombic or monoclinic phase, with Cmma or P112/a1 (or P2/c) space group, over a broad temperature range from 150 K to 120 K, centered at T0 ~137 K. Therefore the temperature of this structural phase transition is strongly reduced, by about ~30K, by increasing the internal chemical pressure going from LaOFeAs to NdOFeAs. In contrast the superconducting critical temperature increases from 27 K to 51 K going from LaOFeAs to NdOFeAs doped samples. This result shows that the normal striped orthorhombic Cmma phase competes with the superconducting tetragonal phase. Therefore by controlling the internal chemical pressure in new materials it should be possible to push toward zero the critical temperature T0 of the structural phase transition, giving the striped phase, in order to get superconductors with higher Tc.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Intrinsic phase separation in superconducting K0.8Fe1.6Se2 (Tc= 31.8 K) single crystals

Temperature dependent single-crystal x-ray diffraction (XRD) in transmission mode probing the bulk of the newly discovered K0.8Fe1.6Se2 superconductor (Tc = 31.8 K) using synchrotron radiation is reported. A clear evidence of intrinsic phase separation at 520 K between two competing phases, (i) a first majority magnetic phase with a ThCr2Si2-type tetragonal lattice modulated by the iron vacancy ordering and (ii) a minority non-magnetic phase having an in-plane compressed lattice volume and a weak superstructure, is reported. The XRD peaks due to the Fe vacancy ordering in the majority phase disappear by increasing the temperature at 580 K, well above phase separation temperature confirming the order-disorder phase transition. The intrinsic phase separation at 520K between a competing first magnetic phase and a second non-magnetic phase in the normal phase both having lattice superstructures (that imply different Fermi surface topology reconstruction and charge density) is assigned to a lattice-electronic instability of the K0.8Fe1.6Se2 system typical of a system tuned at a Lifshitz critical point of an electronic topological transition that gives a multi-gaps superconductor tuned a shape resonance.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure