Marzia Freo

The impact of sales promotions on store performance: a structural vector autoregressive approach

Abstract.The present paper analyses the impact of sales promotions on store performance, in the short and long term, from the retailers point of view. Relationships among promoted and regular sales in the hypermarkets of a large-scale retail chain of national importance, are investigated by means of a structural vector autoregressive model (SVAR). Statistically significant effects of sales promotions in the heavy household section on store sales are found in the short-run; these promotions produce additional sales and thus act as an attractive factor. Promotions in textile category, on the contrary, produce an immediate negative effect on net sales. In the long run, negative statistically significant effects on regular sales are detected when promotions are repeatedly implemented within perishables category.

The impact of information and communication technologies: an insight at micro-level on one Italian region

It has been debated as to whether European countries and Italy itself have yet shared in the US productivity growth driven by the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. This paper investigates the extent of ICT diffusion in manufacturing firms from an Italian region and its effect on performance at a micro-level from 2002 to 2008. It contributes to previous findings from three perspectives. First, it investigates the causal link between ICT adoption and productivity; second, it considers the distributional effect of ICT by measuring its impact on firms with different levels of efficiency and productivity; and third, it takes into account the important distinction between productive ICT embedded in machinery and capital equipment and integrating ICT acquired as licenses or know-how as external disembodied technology, with the basic purpose being to identify the channels through which ICT may work for different types of firms. The main findings are that (i) a wide dissemination of ICT is not exploited to its full potential; (ii) the ICT adoption has produced higher growth in technical efficiency for adopter firms than for the non-adopter firms, but slower growth in productivity, so supporting the productive paradox at the firm level; and (iii) different types of ICTs have had opposite impact among adopter firms – the adoption of ICTs as productive embodied technologies has accelerated the performance growth of firms with lower growth rates, while the adoption of ICTs of organisational type has increased their delay in efficiency and productivity with respect to the firms with higher growth rates.

A Support for Classifying Scientific Papers in a University Department

Abstract Measuring the productivity of the research community is a challenging and relevant issue at the national and institutional levels. To this aim several lists which classify scientific journals have been provided by both public and private companies according to specific motivations. The existence of a multiplicity of lists from one hand, the always increasing number of journals and the variegate publishing strategies of the single researchers from the other one, pose the problem of the definition and assessment of the set of scientific journals that maximally cover the potential heterogeneous research domains. This work proposes a procedure for merging the classifications provided by competing lists of journal from different institutions, solving indeterminacies and missing attributions.

Un nuovo approccio statistico per l’individuazione delle manipolazioni degli utili: evidenze empiriche dal mercato italiano

Mediante uno studio di simulazione, questo articolo si propone di valutare l’efficacia nel mercato italiano dei metodi comunemente utilizzati nella letteratura nord-americana per individuare le manipolazioni di bilancio. Inoltre, viene proposta una nuova metodologia di stima degli accrual model - il modello delle misture - che non si basa su nessuna classificazione industriale e risolve alcuni dei problemi che questi metodi di indagine manifestano nei paesi con mercati finanziari di minori dimensioni. Dalle analisi svolte emerge che le tecniche d’indagine ampiamente utilizzate a livello internazionale sono efficaci anche nel nostro Paese e che il modello delle misture aumenta significativamente la potenza del test piu efficace per ricercare la presenza di manipolazioni di bilancio. Complessivamente questi risultati indurrebbero a concludere che gli accrual model potrebbero essere utilizzati maggiormente dai ricercatori interessati ad investigare la presenza di politiche di bilancio in Italia.

Estimating accruals models in Europe: industry-based approaches versus a data-driven approach

Abstract Accruals models have been estimated using a variety of approaches, but the industry-based cross-sectional approach currently seems to be the standard method. This estimation approach cannot be easily used in the vast majority of European countries where several industry groups do not have sufficient yearly observations. Using data from France, Germany, Italy and the UK, we artificially induce earnings manipulations to investigate how the ability to detect those manipulations through accruals models is affected by the use of different industry classifications. Moreover, we propose an alternative estimation approach based on a data-driven statistical procedure that provides an optimal choice of estimation samples. Our analyses show that enlarging the industry classification and/or pooling observations across years reduces the probability of discovering earnings manipulations but allows for the estimation of abnormal accruals (AA) for more firms. The data-driven approach, however, in most cases outperforms the industry-based estimation approaches without sample attrition. This result suggests that there is still ample room for improving the accruals model estimation process for capital markets of European countries. Furthermore, the analysis documents which accruals model outperforms the others in each of the four countries and the probabilities to detect earning management in a high variety of circumstances.

Learning-by-Exporting and Productivity: Evidences from a Panel of Manufacturing Firms

This paper investigates the dynamics of productivity experienced by firms that start to exporting. The effect of entering into international markets is disentangled by the self-selection component and its empirical distribution is evaluated. Results show that the impact on productivity of moving from the status of non-exporter to the status of exporter is different at different sections of the productivity distribution.

Vertical Disintegration of Machinery Firms in Emilia-Romagna

This paper investigates the strength of the impact of vertical disintegration and outsourcing on the organization of small firms of the machinery industry of Emilia-Romagna. To this purpose we exploit the availability of fiscal data for the year 2005 which enables to analyze the heterogeneous features of production processes according to which firms are grouped into clusters homogeneous in term of the length of the process and the propensity to outsource. Then we evaluate the changes that have occurred in industrial structure with respect to the organization of the Emilian model described by Brusco (1982) in the first 1980s and we find that the dualism between large firms directly accessing the market and small firms mainly subcontractors has been partially replaced by the insertion of a further segment composed of small-sized firms that play both the roles and act as leaders of local chains and as subcontractors for large companies.

An insight into the fragmentation of small firms under global competition in a machinery industrial district

This paper aims to investigate the impact of outsourcing, vertical disintegration and globalisation on the organisation and industrial relations of small district enterprises. In contrast to the extant literature, the focus is on subcontractors rather than on outsourcers. The study exploits a new source of fiscal data and places attention on the machinery sector of Emilia–Romagna, whose heterogeneity is disentangled by grouping enterprises into homogeneous clusters according to the length of their production processes and outsourcing propensities. The changes that have occurred in industrial organisation are evaluated by means of a comparison with the structure of the Emilian model in the 1980, as described by Brusco (1982). With respect to the dualism between small firms acting mainly as subcontractors and large firms directly accessing the market, a further segment composed of small-sized enterprises that simultaneously play the role of local supply chain leaders and subcontractors for large globalised companies is retrieved.

Osservatorio del mercato del lavoro della provincia di Bologna: Rapporto 2006

The Report presents the main informations about labour market in the county of Bologna during 2006. The Bologna labour market goes fairly well: in front of a positive business cycle employment is still growing and Bologna county has met many of the Lisbon targets. Nevertheless, in a comparison with European regions some weaknesses are shown, mainly for what concerns human capital formation and flexibility of firms’ organization. Moreover, the quality of employment is worsening, as a growing percentage of new jobs are on of a fixed term kind.