Do Social Enterprises Finance Their Investments Differently from For-proft Firms?

Using a longitudinal data set of balance sheets of 504 non profit and for-profit firms operating in the social residential sector in Italy, we investigate the relationship between capital structure and type of enterprise. The nondistribution constraint typical of nonprofit organizations increases the fraction of own capital on total investment: this is shown, by means of a theoretical moral hazard model, to reduce their leverage. By contrast, the intrinsecally high commitment of nonprofit entrepreneurs weakens the moral hazard problem: this augments leverage (ii). Our empirical analysis shows that once control for observable characteristics for-profitt companies have a leverage 6% higher than nonprofit enterprises, even if the latter faces lower credit costs. We explain this finding by arguing that effect prevails on effect.for-profit and nonprofit enterprises; capital structure

Global History in Egyptology: Framing Resilient Shores

Global history is generally viewed as solely pertinent to 1492 CE and subsequent centuries; nonetheless it should not be understood in such literal terms. The world has been interconnected for far longer. Globalization—that is, multiple connections across regions—affected Egypt and the Near East far more deeply than has often been accepted. The methods and approaches developed within the global perspective offered by “global history” have been used as tools for rewriting another type of history. In recent years numerous scholars in adjacent fields have adopted an explicitly globalist approach. Egyptologists have been slow to adopt either the scope or the methodologies advocated by global history. A traditional Eurocentric vision flattens the path of history and the vitality of ancient Egypt. This volume, then, is a concerted attempt to help foster a dialogue that will—it is hoped—be of benefit both to global historians and to the study of Egyptian history, to which this journal is devoted. After all, a direction forcefully emerges through the clouds: moreThis article describes how Egyptology as a field of study relates to the emergence of increasingly global histories. Following a brief introduction to theoretical issues of categorization and ontology on the basis of concepts introduced by Michel Foucault, the author describes "isolationist" approaches to ancient Egypt. These emerged from interpretations of Egypt's physical environment, forms of "Egyptian" identity expressed in ancient sources, and the colonialist history of Egyptology itself. These factors are intertwined with one another and contribute to a state of affairs in which scholars interested in global histories do not incorporate potentially valuable Egyptian material as much as they could, while some Egyptologists continue to view the object of their studies as exceptional and exclusive. The final section of the article outlines the potential for global history to benefit Egyptology, and vice versa, through three main objectives: decentring, as well as transcending the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures; recognizing connections, not only among regions, areas, and cities but also between the different sectors of society; and comparison, in order to avoid isolation and stimulate new perspectives that arise through contact with different fields and cultures.resilient shores are needed for Egyptology

Restructuring Italian Utility Markets: Household Distributional Effects

Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of public utilities and to see how many households fall below a critical threshold. This issue is analysed stressing how climatic conditions dramatically affect households’ expenditure and how the affordability of utility bills varies a lot from region to region. So far, utilities’ reforms do not seem to have produced negative effects on the weaker group of households.Consumer behaviour, Public utilities, Regulation, Gas, Electricity, Water

Modulation, plasticity, and pathophysiology of the cerebellar parallel fiber-Purkinje cell synapse

An overview of the modulation, plasticity, and pathophysiology of the cerebellar parallel fiber-Purkinje cell synaps

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the rst two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by o¤ering agents a contract from a xed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We nd that (heterogeneous) social preferences are signi cant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-of between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences

What do we learn from recall consumption data?

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of functional literacy on earnings. The IALS surveys 12 OECD countries and sub-regions via a consistent questionnaire and includes a number of tests of numeracy and literacy, as well as basic labour market information. This paper examines the effect of these skills on labour market earnings for the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and for Great Britain. The estimates suggest that while ability has a role in determining earnings the dominant factor remains formal education. It is shown that, particularly for Great Britain, there is a positive interaction between the test score and education in determining earnings.

At the dawn of the Late Bronze Age “globalization”: the (re)-circulation of Egyptian artefacts in Nubia and the Northern Levant in the MB II–mid MB III (c. 1710 – 1550 BC)

The article analyses the circulation of late Middle Kingdom (mid MB I–MB I/II) Egyptian artefacts in the Northern Levant and Upper Nubia in the MB II–mid MB III (c. 1710–1550 BC). Three case studies have been selected: the royal tombs of Byblos, the tomb of the Goats at Ebla, and the Egyptian Cemetery at Kerma. Although the two regions were politically disconnected, their populations appropriated, reused, and occasionally reinterpreted Egyptian artefacts in a similar manner. These artifacts, although found in Second Intermediate Period contexts, generally dated to the mid MB I-MB I/II (late Middle Kingdom). It is suggested that the collapse of Egyptian central power at the end of the Middle Kingdom could have led to the recirculation of older Egyptian objects. The recirculation suggests that the ‘globalisation’, noted in archaeology and text during the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BC) in fact started in the first half of the Second millennium BC

Is there a retirement consumption puzzle in Italy?

In this paper we investigate the way consumption changes around retirement in Italy. Using micro data covering the 1985-96 period, we find that consumption age patterns are similar to those found in the US and other developed countries, despite the much more wide-spread cohabitation of different generations. We also document the existence of a one-off drop in consumption at retirement of the household head, as in the UK and the US, and find that consumption of work-related goods falls around retirement age and home production of food and other goods increases. Given that we can provide evidence that Italian households who retired over the sample period knew reasonably well what their pension income would be, the only reason why forward looking consumers should reduce spending around retirement is because of their increased consumption of leisure. We do find evidence that the abrupt falls in total non-durable consumption at retirement disappear when leisure is taken into account, in agreement with the predictions of the life-cycle theory. This finding is robust to the way consumption is attributed to different household members, and to exclusion of non-nuclear households from the analysis.

Technology, Skills and Retirement

In our work we study the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills and their utilization in the retirement decision. We provide empirical evidence based on Italian panel data in favour of the hypothesis that - ceteris paribus - better educated male employees with ICT know-how retire later. Such effect is stronger the longer the time horizon considered, and its magnitude is remarkably larger than the one observed in US and Germany in previous studies. We also document that ICT do not play a crucial role in the retirement decision of women. Our results are robust to the estimation strategy adopted.retirement, skill-biased technological change

What do we learn from recall consumption data?

In this paper we use two complementary Italian data sources (the 1995 Istat and Bank of Italy household surveys) to generate household-specific non-durable expenditure in the Bank of Italy sample that contains relatively high-quality income data. We show that food expenditure data are of comparable quality and informational content across the two surveys, once heaping, rounding and time averaging are properly accounted for. We therefore depart from standard practice and rely on the estimation of an inverse Engel curve on Istat data to impute non-durable expenditure to Bank of Italy observations, and show how these estimates can be used to analyse consumption age profiles conditional on demographics. Our key result is that predictions based on a standard set of demographic and socioeconomic indicators are quite different from predictions that also condition on simulated food consumption, in the sense that their age profile is less in line with the implications of the standard consumer intertemporal optimization problem.recall errors, heaping and rounding, multiple imputations and consumption