Relationship Lending, Distance and Efficiency in a Heterogeneous Banking System

During the last decades banks have progressively moved towards centralized and hierarchical organizational structures. Therefore, the investigation of the determinants of bank efficiency and relationships with the functional distance between the bank head-quarter and operational units have become increasingly important. This paper extends the literature on bank efficiency examining the impact of different bank business models on the efficiency of the Italian banks, distinguished by size and type over the period 2006-2009. Using a stochastic frontier approach, the intertemporal relationships between bank efficiency and some key variables, as distance and income diversification (used as proxies of different organizational banking models) are investigated. Results suggest that organizational structure significantly affects cost efficiency, being different between bank groups.relationship lending; bank groups; credit risk; stochastic frontiers; panel data

Networking and spatial interactions: what contributes most to increasing museums’ attractiveness?

Given the relevance of museums in promoting cultural, tourism, and economic development in local territories, we investigate the influence of both spatial and non-spatial interactions on museum attractiveness. In particular, we assess whether non-spatial collaborations such as partnerships and networking, contribute to enhancing their level of competitiveness and if spatial dependence occurs among neighbouring museums. Additionally, we differentiate the analysis by considering various location typologies, that is, sites located in highly attractive and remote areas. Findings from this study can assist policymakers in designing ad hoc strategies to encourage the active role of museums in their local context

Public subsidies, TFP and efficiency : a tale of complex relationships

This paper shows that a suitable decomposition of TFP can be applied to a large sample of subsidized firms for a relevant period of time, allowing an evaluation of the impact of subsidies on either the roles of technical progress and technical efficiency change or scale and allocative efficiency change as determinants of granted firms’ long-term growth. We measure and decompose TFP using a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The impact of capital subsidies on the different components of TFP is captured by a quasi–experimental method (Multiple RDD), exploiting the conditions for a local random experiment created by Law 488/92 (L488), which has been an important policy instrument for reducing territorial disparities in Italy. The main findings from the case study are twofold. First, capital subsidies positively affect TFP growth in the medium-long term and not in the short term. The main reason is that allocative efficiency has a positive effect only after 2-3 years. Second, the positive impact comes especially through technical progress and not through scale impact change, as may have been expected

Place-based amenities, well-being and territorial competitiveness: a new approach using tourists’ happiness

The well-being generated by each place is an unobservable characteristic affecting local competitiveness and territorial growth. In evaluating local well-being, the use of residents’ perceptions may generate biased evaluations. Alternatively, a revealed-preference analysis of tourists’ happiness might be exploited to assess the quality of life at the destination. Then, we develop a hedonic utility function to analyze a huge and original dataset of foreign tourists’ satisfaction, visiting Italy over 2005-2014, on a large number of place-based amenities. Results show a great diversity in the mix of features that affect tourist well-being at each destination, indicating strong heterogeneity in place-based amenities, correlated in space. The presence of spatially correlated common factors of competitiveness asks for coordinated action plans on the part of local and regional authorities

Large critical current density improvement in Bi-2212 wires through groove-rolling process

Recently the interest about Bi-2212 round wire superconductor for high magnetic field use has been enhancing despite the fact that an increase of the critical current is still needed to boost its successful use in such applications. Recent studies have demonstrated that the main obstacle to current flow, especially in long wires, is the residual porosity inside these Powder-In-Tube processed conductors which develops in bubbles-agglomeration when the Bi-2212 melts. Through this work we tried to overcome this issue acting on the wire densification by changing the deformation process. Here we show the effects of groove-rolling versus drawing process on the critical current density JC and on the microstructure. In particular, groove-rolled multifilamentary wires show a JC increased by a factor of about 3 with respect to drawn wires prepared with the same Bi-2212 powder and architecture. We think that this approach in the deformation process is able to produce the required improvements both because the superconducting properties are enhanced and because it makes the fabrication process faster and cheaper

Life Cycle Consumption and the Great Recession

Using Italian Household Budget Survey data for the period 1997-2013, this paper estimates the life cycle profiles of consumption and cross-sectional variance in the Great Recession. The study examines age profiles for total and durable expenditure, and four subcomponents of non-durable expenditure. We document significant heterogeneity in the way the recession affects consumption and the variance within-cohorts. The crisis has entailed a fall in expenditure for the youngest cohorts, and a notable reduction of inequalities for the middle and oldest cohorts with some differences between high and low income elastic expenditure. We also found that socio-demographic factors account for a substantial heterogeneity in consumption behaviour during the recession across households and expenditure subcomponents

Measuring machinewashing under the corporate digital responsibility theory: A proposal for a methodological path

Recently, a number of scholars have warned against the risk of a new form of deliberately deceptive communication companies use to assure stakeholders of their good intentions in the adoption and development of digital technologies and advanced information systems based on artificial intelligence. This corporate behaviour, defined as machinewashing, in an attempt to empower engagement processes in the stakeholders’ network and satisfy stakeholder expectations with regard to the ethical implications of the use of artificial intelligence, has, in the final instance, the prevailing purpose of achieving better levels of corporate performance and reputation. However, thus far, scholars have not provided any empirical studies on the existence of corporate machinewashing strategies, and there is a significant lack of clarity as to how to measure machinewashing. Utilising the corporate digital responsibility theory, this paper offers an original methodological contribution to the nascent research field dedicated to machinewashing behaviour. Particularly, this paper provides considerations for detecting machinewashing through an analysis based on the comparison between the information capacity of the reporting and the information reliability level as a proxy for machinewashing strategies and, thus, for the real impact of digitalisation strategies on stakeholders. To this end, we conducted an exploratory content analysis of the reports of ten Italian listed companies from ten different industries. Overall, looking at the gap between what companies say about the impact of digitalisation from an ethical perspective, and what really happens, our results define a possible path for identifying machinewashing, the fields where it happens and the practices that companies use in order to realise these strategies

Do sustainability policies finance local economies?

We evaluate whether adopting a well-known transition management instrument in the tourism industry can support a combined goal of sustainability and economic growth. We create a detailed dataset at the municipality level and use a recently developed policy evaluation technique to investigate the causal impact of the Blue Flag program on the local economies of coastal destinations. Estimates show that this eco-label is not effective at enhancing the local economy; findings are homogeneous across destinations. This empirical result is in line with the recent theoretical literature arguing that the transition towards growing a sustainable economy is particularly complex and a single policy does not suffice

Sliding friction and superlubricity of colloidal AFM probes coated by tribo-induced graphitic transfer layers

Colloidal probe Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) allows to explore sliding friction phenomena in graphite contacts of nominal lateral size up to hundreds of nanometers. It is known that contact formation involves tribo-induced material transfer of graphite flakes from the graphitic substrate to the colloidal probe. In this context, sliding states with nearly-vanishing friction, i.e. superlubricity, may set in. A comprehensive investigation of the transfer layer properties is mandatory to ascertain the origin of superlubricity. Here we explore the friction response of micrometric beads, of different size and pristine surface roughness, sliding on graphite under ambient conditions. We show that such tribosystems undergo a robust transition towards a low-adhesion, low-friction state dominated by mechanical interactions at one dominant tribo-induced nanocontact. Friction force spectroscopy reveals that the nanocontact can be superlubric or dissipative, in fact undergoing a load-driven transition from dissipative stick-slip to continuous superlubric sliding. This behavior is excellently described by the thermally-activated, single-asperity Prandtl-Tomlinson model. Our results indicate that upon formation of the transfer layer, friction depends on the energy landscape experienced by the topographically-highest tribo-induced nanoasperity. Consistently we find larger dissipation when the tribo-induced nanoasperity is sled against surfaces with higher atomic corrugation than graphite, like MoS2 and WS2, in prototypical Van der Waals layered hetero-junctions.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, to be published in Langmui