New Workplace Practices and Firm Performance: A Comparative Study of Italy and Britain

Using data from the 2004 Workplace Employee Relations Survey on British establishments and two surveys on manufacturing firms located in the North of Italy, we look at the diffusion of new workplace practices in the two countries and at their impact on the firm's value added. We find that the adoption of innovation practices has spread substantially more across the British manufacturing firms than across the Italian ones; however our results also indicate that the practices' association with the firms' VA is much lower in Britain than in Italy. The counterfactual analysis shows that had the Italian workplaces the same characteristics of the British ones, in terms of diffusion of practices, capital intensity and skills, their average predicted value added would triplicate. On the other hand, were the Italian establishments to move and operate in the British context, their performance would improve very modestly. For the British establishments, we also investigate whether management practices improve job satisfaction.Workplace practices; Financial Performance; Italy; UK

On Geometric Quantum Confinement in Grushin-type Manifolds

We study the problem of so-called geometric quantum confinement in a class of two-dimensional incomplete Riemannian manifold with metric of Grushin type. We employ a constant-fibre direct integral scheme, in combination with Weyl's analysis in each fibre, thus fully characterising the regimes of presence and absence of essential self-adjointness of the associated Laplace-Beltrami operator.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Early Labour Market Returns to College Subjects

This paper aims at estimating early labour market outcomes of Italian university graduates across college subjects. We devote great attention to endogenous selection issues using alternative methods to control for potential self-selection associated with the choice of the degree subject in order to unravel the causal link between college major and subsequent outcomes in the labour market. Our results suggest that “quantitative” fields (i.e. Sciences, Engineering and Economics) increase not only the speed of transition into the first job and employment probability but also early earnings, conditional on employment.University to work transition; College subject; Self-selection; Returns to education

Ungauging black holes and hidden supercharges

We embed the general solution for non-BPS extremal asymptotically flat static and under-rotating black holes in abelian gauged D=4 N=2 supergravity, in the limit where the scalar potential vanishes but the gauging does not. Using this result, we show explicitly that some supersymmetries are preserved in the near horizon region of all the asymptotically flat solutions above, in the gauged theory. This reveals a deep relation between microscopic entropy counting of extremal black holes in Minkowski and BPS black holes in AdS. Finally, we discuss the relevance of this construction to the structure of asymptotically AdS4 black holes, as well as the possibility of including hypermultiplets.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figure, v2: Corrections in section 5, comments added, references update

Associations between facial emotion recognition and young adolescents\u2019 behaviors in bullying

This study investigated whether different behaviors young adolescents can act during bullying episodes were associated with their ability to recognize morphed facial expressions of the six basic emotions, expressed at high and low intensity. The sample included 117 middle-school students (45.3% girls; mean age = 12.4 years) who filled in a peer nomination questionnaire and individually performed a computerized emotion recognition task. Bayesian generalized mixed-effects models showed a complex picture, in which type and intensity of emotions, students\u2019 behavior and gender interacted in explaining recognition accuracy. Results were discussed with a particular focus on negative emotions and suggesting a \u201cneutral\u201d nature of emotion recognition ability, which does not necessarily lead to moral behavior but can also be used for pursuing immoral goals

Does Labor Diversity Affect Firm Productivity?

Using an employer-employee dataset, we analyze how diversity in cultural background, skills and demographic characteristics affects total factor productivity (TFP) of firms in Denmark. Implementing structural estimation of firms’ production function, we find evidence that labor diversity in skills/education significantly enhances firm performance as measured by firm TFP. Conversely, diversity in demographics and ethnicity brings mixed results – both dimensions of workforce diversity have either no or negative effects on firm TFP. Hence, it seems as if the negative effects, coming from communication and integration costs connected to a more demographically and culturally diverse workforce, counteract the positive effects of diversity on firm TFP, coming from creativity and knowledge spillovers. However, we find that ethnic diversity is valuable for firms operating in industries characterized by above-average trade openness, giving support to the hypothesis that an ethnically diverse workforce provides information and access to global markets.Labor diversity; skill complementarities; communication barriers; total factor productivity

Unique and interactive effects of moral emotions and moral disengagement on bullying and defending among school children

The first aim of the present study was to examine in a single model how moral disengagement and moral emotions were related to bullying and defending behavior among schoolchildren. The second aim was to test whether the two moral dimensions interacted with each other to explain behavior in bullying situations. Data were collected from 561 Swedish students. Moral disengagement was positively associated with bullying and negatively associated with defending, whereas moral emotions score was negatively associated with bullying and positively associated with defending. Moreover, students who scored high in moral emotions did not tend to bully other students, irrespective of their levels of moral disengagement, whereas when the moral emotions score was low bullying behavior increased with increasing levels of moral disengagement. In contrast, moral disengagement was negatively related to defending behavior at low levels of moral emotions, but not when moral emotions were high

The Nexus between Labor Diversity and Firm's Innovation

In this paper we investigate the nexus between rm labor diversity and innovation using a linked employer-employee data from Denmark. Specically, exploiting information retrieved from the comprehensive database and implementing a proper instrumental variable strategy, we are able to identify the contribution of workers diversity in cultural background, skills and demographic characteristics to valuable firm's innovation activity. The latter is measured by: (1) the firm's propensity to apply for a patent, (2) the number of patent applications (intensive margin) and (3) the firm's ability to patent in different technological areas (extensive margin). We find that skill and ethnic diversity plays an important role in propelling firm's innovation outcomes. Conversely, the effect of demographic diversity typically vanishes once detailed firm-specic characteristics are included as control variables.Labor diversity, patenting activity, extensive and intensive margins.

High-Performance Management Practices and Employee Outcomes in Denmark

High-performance work practices are frequently considered to have positive eects on corporate performance, but what do they do for employees? After showing that organizational innovation is indeed positively associated with rm performance, we investigate whether high-involvement work practices are associ- ated with higher wages, changes in wage inequality and workforce composition, using data from a survey directed at Danish private sector rms matched with linked employer-employee data. We also examine whether the relationship be- tween high-involvement work practices and employee outcomes is aected by the industrial relations contextWorkplace practices; wage inequality; workforce composition; hierarchy

External Validation of the Use of Vignettes in Cross-Country Health Studies

Cross-country comparisons of subjective assessments are rendered difficult if not impossible because of sub-population specific response style. To correct for this, the use of vignettes has become increasingly popular, notably within cross-country health studies. However, the validity of vignettes as a means to re-scale across sample populations critically rests on the assumption of "response consistency" (RC): that vignettes and self-assessments are evaluated on the same scale. In this paper, we seek to test this assumption by applying objective measures of health along with subjective measures and vignettes. Our results indicate that the assumption of RC is not innocuous and that our extended model relaxing this assumption improves the fit and significantly changes the cross-country rankings of health vis-à-vis the standard Chopit model.cross-country health comparison, vignettes, subjective and objective measures