Filippo Belloc

How individual characteristics affect university students drop-out: a semiparametric mixed-effects model for an Italian case study

University drop-out is a topic of increasing concern in Italy as well as in other countries. In empirical analysis, university drop-out is generally measured by means of a binary variable indicating the drop-out versus retention. In this paper, we argue that the withdrawal decision is one of the possible outcomes of a set of four alternatives: retention in the same faculty, drop out, change of faculty within the same university, and change of institution. We examine individual-level data collected by the administrative offices of “Sapienza” University of Rome, which cover 117 072 students enrolling full-time for a 3-year degree in the academic years from 2001/2002 to 2006/2007. Relying on a non-parametric maximum likelihood approach in a finite mixture context, we introduce a multinomial latent effects model with endogeneity that accounts for both heterogeneity and omitted covariates. Our estimation results show that the decisions to change faculty or university have their own peculiarities, thus we suggest that caution should be used in interpreting results obtained without modeling all the relevant alternatives that students face.

Liberalizing telecommunications in Europe: path dependency and institutional complementarities

We empirically investigate the nature and outcomes of the liberalization process in European telecommunications. First, we show that decisions to liberalize a countrys telecommunications sector have followed a path-dependent and cumulative pace. Moreover, we investigate the extent to which path dependency might have forced liberalizations, regardless of the creation of complementary institutions governing pro-market outcomes. We find that the impact of liberalizations on competition is strongly enhanced by the establishment of complementary institutions, such as the national regulatory authority. Our findings contribute to the existing literature by outlining the role played by path dependency and institutional complementarities in the process of European liberalization. Our conclusions may provide useful lessons for the optimal policy design of pro-market policies in those European network industries that still wait for substantial liberalization.

Unbundling Technology Adoption and TFP at the Firm Level - Do Intangibles Matter?

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate production function parameters allowing, within each sector, for the existence of multiple technologies. We find that intangible assets both push the firm towards better technologies (technology adoption effects) and allow for a more efficient exploitation of a given technology (tfp effects).

Partisan privatizations: assessing the ideological bias

Previous empirical literature suggests that privatization choices are driven by ideology. However, available measures of this political bias are weakly grounded as they neglect crucial factors affecting privatizations, such as the liberalization levels and the public finance structure. To fill this gap, we perform an econometric analysis explicitly considering such neglected factors. Our findings conclude that privatization choices in OECD network industries are determined by right-wing ideology.

A dynamic hurdle model for zeroinflated panel count data

This article proposes an approximate conditional dynamic finite mixture hurdle model for panel count data with excess of zeros and endogenous initial conditions. We provide parameter estimates by using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in a Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood (NPML) framework. An application to a unique data set on traffic violation counts of a subpopulation of Italian drivers is given.

Scelte di uscita dalla famiglia e disuguaglianze nelle opportunità

In Italia i giovani lasciano la famiglia d’origine piu tardi che negli altri paesi europei. L’obiettivo di questo articolo e individuare le variabili rilevanti nella scelta di uscita dalla famiglia di origine e verificare se le opportunita di uscita siano distribuite omogeneamente tra tutti gli individui, con particolare riguardo alla condizione professionale di figlio e capofamiglia. I dati utilizzati sono ottenuti dalla Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) della Banca d’Italia. L’analisi empirica e svolta attraverso stime cross-section probit e panel probit e attraverso un’analisi multifattoriale. Il risultato principale che viene raggiunto e l’individuazione del ruolo cruciale giocato dalle risorse economiche, in special modo dai redditi. Poiche in Italia la loro distribuzione e fortemente condizionata dallo status professionale, nel mercato del lavoro si genera un dualismo che si ripercuote sulle opportunita di uscita dalla famiglia d’origine.

Employee Representation Legislations and Innovation: Evidence from Manufacturing Sectors

We analyse how sectoral innovation outcomes are affected by national legislations of worker participation to corporate governance. We develop a model of employee representation laws (ERL) and innovation in the presence of incomplete labour contracts and predict heterogeneous ERL effects across different systems of dismissal regulation. We then perform a panel regression analysis, exploiting panel data for five countries over the 1977-2005 period and 21 two-digit manufacturing sectors. We find that ERL effects on aggregate innovation output are positive, statistically significant and higher in magnitude where national labour laws impose significant firing costs to the firm with respect to institutional settings in which firing costs are low or absent. These results are robust to possible technology selection dynamics, endogeneity and institutional changes in the legal system of patent protection. We also estimate ERL effects on innovation conditional on firing costs at an industry level and show that the impact of ERL is relatively larger in those sectors where the human capital contribution to production is higher. Our results have relevant implications for the optimal design of employee representation legislations.

Liberalization Patterns: The Case of Electronic Communications

This chapter offers a specific focus on the liberalization patterns in the telecommunications sector, which has been steadily at the heart of national and international debates about industrial policy in Europe in the last decades. With reference to the telecommunications market, we discuss the role of institutional complementarities and show that the removal of entry barriers to market before the establishment of a regulatory authority has reduced, in some countries, the positive impact of liberalizations on the telecommunications market structure.

Liberalization, Antitrust, and Pro-Consumer Policies

This chapter focuses on the role that competition and pro-consumer policies play in enhancing the impact of liberalization. Concerning antitrust law, the analysis will be devoted in particular to the so-called essential facility doctrine and to the enforcement of antitrust law against margin squeeze abuses of a dominant position. Recent cases have raised the question of how to define the proper boundary between regulation and competition policy in this respect. We then analyze the so-called “demand side” liberalization policy, i.e., policies and regulation aimed at empowering the final consumer in order to enhance freedom to choose among providers, to reduce switching costs, and to increase churn rates.

Political Market Design in Network Industries

This chapter focuses on the political determinants of liberalization and, particularly, on the debate raised by the empirical literature. We report updated data on market liberalizations and analyze countries’ aggregate trends and sectoral patterns. In particular, we explore such heterogeneity in market liberalization patterns and analyze the role played by government ideology. We show that right-wing governments pushed for privatization policies more intensively than left-oriented ones, whereas left-wing governments favored liberalization over privatization. Thus, within the common neoliberalism wave, a partisan trade-off between privatization and liberalization seems to have characterized OECD countries’ governance of network industries. We propose and discuss various interpretations of these findings, including the role of policy diffusion dynamics, swing voters signaling, possible policy reversal and institutional drivers effects, the role of public finance concerns, and the emergence of new political agendas.