What determines productivity level in the long run? Evidence from Italians regions

In this paper we estimate the long-run relationship between total factor productivity, R&D capital stock and human capital in the Italian regions between 1980 and 2001. We exploit recent developments of panel cointegration techniques to estimate the cointegration relationship, allowing for endogeneity and heterogeneity of regional cointegration vectors. The evidence shows that there exists a long-run equilibrium among the variables and that human capital elasticity is larger than R&D elasticity. Conditioned on the long-run equilibrium, we set out an Error Correction Model of TFP growth. In this framework, we test for exogeneity of TFP determinants, by carrying out Granger-causality tests. Our findings show that human capital is exogenously generated out of the model, while TFP and R&D are simultaneously determined.

Emerging Markets Spreads and Global Financial Conditions

In this article, we analyse how much of the reduction in emerging markets spreads can be ascribed to specific factors - linked to the improvement in the 'fundamentals' of a given country - rather than to common factors - linked to global liquidity conditions and agentsÂ’ degree of risk aversion. By means of factor analysis, we find that a single common factor is able to explain a large part of the co-variation in emerging market economies spreads observed in the last four years; on its turn, this common factor might be traced back mainly to financial markets volatility. Due to the particularly benign global financial conditions in recent years, spreads seem to have declined to levels lower than those warranted by improved fundamentals. As a consequence, EMEs do remain vulnerable to sudden shift in financial market conditions.emerging markets, spreads, factor analysis

Business cycle non-linearities and productivity shocks

The recent empirical evidence documenting the presence of asymmetries in business cycles represents a challenge for the standard equilibrium models of real business cycle. These models successfully explain most first and second moments of the actual time series, but cannot replicate non-linear features of the data, unless a non-linear innovation is introduced. This paper aims at investigating the possible non-linearity in the technology shock, the basic innovation in Real Business Cycle models. In order to measure the unobservable technology shock, we derive some alternative measures of total factor productivity such as revenue-based and cost-based Solow residual and we also control for cyclical factor utilisation. We test for non-linearities and model a nonlinear SETAR model for the productivity shock as a natural extension of the autoregressive linear process, the standard way of representing technology shocks. Our findings suggest that, although the standard Solow residual turns out to be linear, the other measures of technology shock appear non-linear, as soon as non-technological cyclical components are ruled out.Solow residual, technology shock, non-linear models, linearity test

Emerging market spreads in the recent financial turmoil

This work examines how much of the variation in emerging market economies' (EMEs) spreads can be ascribed to 'country-specific' factors rather than to 'common' factors, once the existence of an interaction between the state of macroeconomic fundamentals and global financial conditions is properly taken into account. By means of factor analysis we find that a single common factor is able to explain a large part of the covariation in EME spreads in the period January 1998-June 2008; in turn, the common factor can be traced back mainly to financial market volatility. Once we have controlled for a set of idiosyncratic macroeconomic fundamentals, the common factor turns out to be a significant determinant of EME spread variations in the recent period of financial turmoil. Finally, the interaction term between global financial conditions and the state of macroeconomic fundamentals plays a significant role in most of the countries, allowing us to show that, for some less virtuous economies, the negative effects of a worsening of global conditions have been magnified by weakening domestic macroeconomic fundamentals.Sovereign spreads, emerging markets, factor analysis, international finance

Regulation performance and investment in telecommunications in the European Union : a policy evaluation approach

According to the European Regulatory Framework in Telecommunications sector, one of the main tasks required from the NRAs is to promote efficient investment and innovation in the field. The aim of this paper is to estimate the relevance of regulation for the growth of investment across 16 EU Countries. This is done estimating how regulation affects revenues and investment elasticity to incumbents’ market power. To do so, we use the panel structure of our data and the timing of the introduction of regulation to carry out two “quasi experiments”, where incumbents are ideally splitted in two groups, according to whether they are subject to a specific regulation or not. We consider a sample of 16 EU countries from 1997 to 2011. The results seem to to suggest that New Regulatory Framework has little reduced the impact of market share on firm’s revenues and investment in the recent years. Over a longer time span instead, being a regulated country does not imply lower revenues and investment by telecommunication companies. Instead, in regulated countries it is likely that the telecom sector benefits from a better economic and institutional environment, which makes firms more productive for a given level of market power. Finally, in countries with a long-lasting regulatory tradition, an increase in market share represents a more significant increase in firm’s market power than in a nonregulated country, so that in regulated countries, elasticity of investment to market share turns to be higher.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

AGGREGATE FLUCTUATIONS IN A UNIONIZED LABOR MARKET

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A homogeneous reconstruction of regional data: household accounts and disposable income, 1970-1995

The paper reconstructs the items of the regional accounts, disposable income and wealth of the household sector for the North-West, North-East, Centre, and South and Islands for the years 1970-1995. The analysis is significant for the length of the sample period, the number of time series considered and its use of an econometric method of disaggregation that ensures efficiency and consistency with the national data available.regional data, household, income

Optimal selection of contracts and work shifts in multi-skill call centers

This paper deals with the problem of finding the most suitable contracts to be used when hiring the operators of a call center and deciding their optimal working schedule, to optimize the trade-off between the service level provided to the customers and the cost of the personnel. In a previous paper (Cordone et al. 2011), we proposed a heuristic method to quickly build an integer solution from the solution of the continuous relaxation of an integer linear programming model. In this paper, we generalize that model to take into account a much wider class of working contracts, allowing heterogeneous shift patterns, as well as legal constraints related to continuously active working environments. Since our original rounding heuristic cannot be extended to the new model, due to its huge size and to the involved correlations between different sets of integer variables, we introduce a more sophisticated heuristic based on decomposition and on a multi-level iterative structure. We compare the results of this heuristic with those of a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure, both on real-world instances and on realistic random instances

Automatic Error Elimination by Multi-Application Code Transfer

We present pDNA, a system for automatically transfer- ring correct code from donor applications into recipient applications to successfully eliminate errors in the recipient. Experimental results using six donor applications to eliminate nine errors in six recipient applications highlight the ability of pDNA to transfer code across applications to eliminate otherwise fatal integer and buffer overflow errors. Because pDNA works with binary donors with no need for source code or symbolic information, it supports a wide range of use cases. To the best of our knowledge, pDNA is the first system to eliminate software errors via the successful transfer of correct code across applications