Giuseppe Tattara

“Una fiera senza luogo”: Was Bisenzone an International Capital Market in Sixteenth-Century Italy?

From the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, Genoese bankers collected money from a variety of sources and lent it to the king of Spain. It was all made possible by the Bisenzone exchange fairs, which created an efficient financial network under Genoese control and permitted arbitrage among northern Italian financial markets. At Bisenzone, Genoese bankers raised money for these loans from a variety of sources, which reduced the risks of lending and funded the kings long-term obligations via short term loans. Bisenzone was in many ways an offshore capital market which operated on an international scale, or, in the language of the sixteenth century, a fair without a place—una fiera senza luogo.

Turnover and Excess Worker Reallocation. The Veneto Labour Market between 1982 and 1996

This research exploits a large matched employer-employee data set for an Italian region, the Veneto, that is presented here for the first time, in order to analyse job and worker flows. In a first part, the paper computes worker turnover, job turnover, and excess worker reallocation over a time span of 14 years. The results are discussed, and comparisons are made between the quantitative features of the labour market in the Veneto region and those of other labour markets. In a second part, turnover and excess worker reallocation are related to search costs, and new empirical evidence is presented that helps in understanding the connections between search activity, unemployment, and the economic cycle.

Labour Market Segmentation, Flexibility and Precariousness in the Italian North East

Since the late 1970s, inequality has been on the rise in a number of OECD countries. One of the main causes of economic inequality, in Italy as in many other European countries, is rooted in the segmentation of the labour market. The Italian labour market is currently described as deeply segmented between an insider ad an outsider market. In the Italian manufacturing sector the quota of stable workers has declined through time and the number of unstable workers, low qualified and low paid, has increased and represents a non-marginal quota of total employment. Frequently a young worker experiments a succession of temporary contracts at the beginning of his career and develop into a more permanent position But temporary workers have, several times, a different destiny: the situation of precariousness extends to the workers’ entire career and are to be considered as an extreme case of outsiders, who operate in bad working conditions and receive low wages compared to workers hired with an open-end contract. In this research workers in manufacturing are divided between movers and stayers. Both categories show signs of instability. The quota of tenure workers over total workers decreases and movers increase through time in a significant way. Among these are permanent movers whose work histories, fragmented and chaotic, are identified and are compared with those of workers having more stable careers.

A Global Network and its Local Ties: Restructuring of the Benetton Group

The paper investigates the change in strategy of the Benetton Group, since the mid nineties, in face of the severe intensive competition in the international fashion market. New competitors, in particular the European brands Zara, Mango and H&M, have challenged the Benetton position in the Italian and the European clothing market and have pushed the Group towards cost reduction through globalization of his suppliers. Benetton is a vertically integrated producer that controls (in different ways) the whole value chain from textile raw materials to the sales to the consumers. Till 2000 Benetton made part of its production in its own factories and through a wide network of domestic sub-contractors, mainly specialized in sewing. Now Benetton has drastically moved to a new strategy, abandoning Italy and organizing production around a dual supply chain: close locations (East Europe and North Africa) for quick production and far away locations (Asia) for more standardised products. The paper discusses also the redefinition of competences for the Treviso clothing district, where Benetton traditional sub-contractors have been in few years, drastically curtailed. Benetton restructuring marks the transition to a new network of competences between agents in the district.

The Cyclical Behaviour of Job and Worker Flows

This research exploits a large employer-level panel dataset in order to analyse employment and worker flows. Excess reallocation, the difference between worker and job flows at the firm level, is substantial and has a definite cyclical pattern. Both accessions and separations are cyclical in contrast to the conventional wisdom that assumes separation to be countercyclical. Separations increase in upswing, following the accession increase, and decline in recession. Unemployment during recession is not, to a large extent, due to an increase in the rate at which workers separate from their employers, as traditionally assumed among macroeconomists, but to the decline in job creations.

On-the-Job Search Over the Business Cycle

On-the-Job Search is one of the most common and efficient ways to look for a new job, most of the time workers move directly from one employment position to another (E-to-E) without an intervening spell of unemployment. E-to-E transitions are a relevant component of total labour flows and have a definite cyclical pattern. This paper computes E-to-E worker flows through the development of a vacancy chain model. An iterative procedure is used to compute the successive reallocation runs, beginning from an autonomous vacancy and then to reconstruct the complete E-to-E transition process. The procedure is implemented and applied to a large micro-panel based on a highly industrialized Italian region from 1982 to 1996. E-to-E transitions are an increasingly large portion of worker flows in the labour market. They are clearly cyclic and the number of transitions increases over time as the labour market becomes tighter. These are the flows that explain labour market dynamics in upswings and recessions. Search models that look only at flows between employment, unemployment and outside of the labour force underestimate labour mobility and its cyclical pattern.

Vacancy chains and the business cycle. Stringing together job-to-job transitions in micro data

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of labour market flows over the business cycle through a vacancy chain model. It provides a direct computation of vacancy chains using micro data, empirically investigates the relationship between chain length and the characteristics of jobs and workers initiating the chain, and finally assesses the wage progression of workers moving along the chain. Design/methodology/approach - – The paper draws on a longitudinal matched employer-employee database covering all employees in manufacturing in a large region of Italy. A transparent algorithm for vacancy chain computation is developed and standard econometric techniques are employed to analyze job-to-job transitions within identified chains. Findings - – Vacancy chains account on average for more than one-third of total hires, and both the number and the length of chains are clearly pro-cyclical. Chains set in motion by women workers, young, old, blue collars, or employed by small firms tend to be shorter. There is a well-defined wage progression from the tail to the head of the chain, revealing that workers are sorted along chains according to skill and/or bargaining power. Research limitations/implications - – There is a limited possibility of identifying separately individual ability and bargaining power. Practical implications - – The vacancy chain methodology can increase the ability of policy makers to produce detailed maps of the labour market and identify worker profiles associated with poor outcomes and hence deserving special attention. Originality/value - – For the first time, this paper operationalizes the vacancy chain approach on a large scale, at a very high level of detail, and over a long-time span.

Manufacturing Abroad While Making Profits at Home: The Veneto Footwear clothing industry

In recent years, applied studies have shown widespread, profound and increasing heterogeneity across firms in terms of their strategy, organization arrangement and performance. This book investigates the diversity of business firms, offering a picture of the different organizational settings they adopt in their endeavour to cope with increasing competitive pressure.

Una Fiera Senza Luogo: Was Bisenzone an Offshore Capital Market in Sixteenth-Century Italy?

This paper discusses how Genoese bankers collected money at exchange fairs. This money was then lent to the King of Spain - through the asientos - from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Genoese bankers raised capital at the exchange fairs , which were typical short-term credit mechanism, where foreign bills of exchange were discounted over a three-month period. The Genoese funded long-term obligations by means of short term loans which meant they were able to enforce payment to the King and at the same time successfully manage the supply of finance from a large number of easily substitutable markets, located in different states. The Bisenzone fair of exchange was the forerunner to an efficient, widely integrated international capital market where Genoese pre-eminence was firmly established and which the Genoese kept firmly under their control. The success of the Bisenzone fairs of exchange directly challenges the theory which suggests that the laws against usury restrained the development of capital markets in early modern Italy.

The governance of the global value chain of Italian industrial districts: selected case studies

This study deals with the reallocation of firms localized in three important Veneto districts in Romania producing footwear, furniture and industrial refrigeration and air conditioning. The Veneto region has a strong specialization in these sectors at the national level. The footwear and furniture firms present a vertically fragmented structure according to a phase specialization. Firms have moved abroad the practice of sourcing that they were used to practice in the domestic economy. Footwear firms have commissioned to foreign subcontractors part of the productive process, or the whole of it, or have established own productive plants abroad through FDI. Furniture firms have made recourse mainly to FDI with the aim of controlling the source of raw materials (wood) while refrigeration and air conditioning look forward to secure there own space in the growing consumer markets of the East, mainly the Russian market, and commission to local manufacturer only the production of some components. These firms are intensive in capital and technology; the main components are bought on the international market and are assembled in Romania. The product is distributed directly in Romania and in the neighbouring countries and cost reduction is not the main issue. The conclusion discusses some theoretical issues connected with the control of the value chain relations in the three cases examined and questions the standard classification put forward by Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon in 2005.