Domenico Sarno

Comparative analysis of private and public provision of the water and waste services by the Italian municipalities

This paper investigates the behavior of private and publicly-owned corporations providing services in local industries that have undergone restructuring interventions since the Nineties in order to promote market contestability. Based on the approaches arising from the transaction costs theory, the paper proposes a comparative analysis of the economic and financial efficiency of a sample of local utilities supplying services in the water and waste industries, observed from 2008 to 2010. The efficiency analysis is achieved by measuring the distance from the stochastic frontier of the production costs of each firm, and the financial efficiency analysis through statement ratios. The findings of the study generally confirm the implications of the transaction costs approach and they show a wide convergence trend between privately and publicly owned organizations for the degree of utilization of input as well as for the financial efficiency analysis. There are sometimes slight differentials on the part of public companies, especially for the larger ones, which can be largely explained by the existence of more stringent welfare-oriented objectives.

The impact of ICT on productivity of Italian firms: evaluation of the micro-complementarity hypothesis

The seminal work of Milgrom and Roberts (1990) established that interactions between factors such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), organization and human capital entail a complementary relationship between these inputs; from such interactions, firms are able to exploit productivity gains arising from ICT investment. The empirical analysis is conducted on a panel of Italian manufacturing firms covering the period 2001–2006. The application of a suited System Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) estimator shows that for firms engaging ICT there exists a more coherent relationship between pair inputs and also among all three inputs considered.

Crescita e sensibilità degli investimenti al cash flow nelle imprese del Mezzogiorno

The analysis of the financial constraints on the firm growth deals with the relationship between the capital structure and the growth of the firm. On this subject there is a massive body of theoretical and empirical studies producing significant, but controversial results. The aim of the paper is to show that the growth of the Mezzogiorno’s small and medium sized firms is financially more constrained compared to the firms of the same size belonging in the other Italian regions. In order to confirm this thesis an empirical analysis about the sensibility of the investment on the internal finance is provided. From the estimates of the Eulero’s investment equation augmented by the cash flow variables follows that the contribution of the internal finance on the growth is higher for the Southern firms. The conclusions underline the larger difficulties by the Southern firms to access to external financial sources due to the higher opacity of the firms and the lower degree of the development of the financial markets in the Southern regions.