Gender Differences in Russian Colour Naming

In the present study we explored Russian colour naming in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment (http://www.colournaming.com). Colour singletons representing the Munsell Color Solid (N=600 in total) were presented on a computer monitor and named using an unconstrained colour-naming method. Respondents were Russian speakers (N=713). For gender-split equal-size samples (NF=333, NM=333) we estimated and compared (i) location of centroids of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs); (ii) the number of words in colour descriptors; (iii) occurrences of BCTs most frequent non-BCTs. We found a close correspondence between females’ and males’ BCT centroids. Among individual BCTs, the highest inter-gender agreement was for seryj ‘grey’ and goluboj ‘light blue’, while the lowest was for sinij ‘dark blue’ and krasnyj ‘red’. Females revealed a significantly richer repertory of distinct colour descriptors, with great variety of monolexemic non-BCTs and “fancy” colour names; in comparison, males offered relatively more BCTs or their compounds. Along with these measures, we gauged denotata of most frequent CTs, reflected by linguistic segmentation of colour space, by employing a synthetic observer trained by gender-specific responses. This psycholinguistic representation revealed females’ more refined linguistic segmentation, compared to males, with higher linguistic density predominantly along the redgreen axis of colour space

Does access to finance improve productivity? The case of Italian manufacturing

Many contributions have analyzed the implications of underdeveloped financial markets for economic growth and efficiency of production, emphasizing their role as a source of misallocation and highlighting their negative impact on firm dynamics and innovation. The phenomenon is particularly severe in economies characterized by high reliance on debt financing, asymmetric information and imperfect capital markets. This paper reviews the literature on the link between finance and total factor productivity (TFP) and presents some microeconomic empirical evidence in support of a negative relationship between a firm’s ability to access external funding and its productivity. We exploit financial accounts data from ORBIS and AMADEUS and focus on a sample of Italian manufacturing firms during the period 2005-2015. Our findings show that financing constraints negatively affect firms’ productivity, with important implications at the aggregate level. We also document that the sensitivity of TFP to credit constraints increased significantly as a result of the Great Recession, possibly explaining the stalling post-crisis Italian recovery