Paola Maddalena Chiodini

Strategic choices in recessionary period: an exploration on italian smes

From the 2012 survey of the Osservatorio Impresa Monza e Brianza we shed some light on the behavior and strategic choices of micro, small and medium sized enterprises to cope with the global financial and economic crisis. The analysis was conducted with the aim of discovering which strategies are more likely to be implemented in the short-term using the Rasch model for multinomial ordinal response categories. Moreover, we present a segmentation based on the enterprises’ reactivity towards the crisis with respect to the effectiveness of crisis measures and the main characteristics of the enterprises.

Fifty Years of Business Confidence Surveys on Manufacturing Sector

In this work the evolution of the Italian Business Confidence Survey on manufacturing sector is presented starting from the preliminary European project for harmonized statistics launched in the late fifties of the last century. Survey changes are described, focusing in particular on the so-called confidence indicator. The continuing increase of statistical accuracy in sampling is recalled, from the initial purposive sample and controls, up to the present state of the art. Specific attention is devoted to the role of administrative archives in the sampling plan. Emphasis is also given to the increasing use of computer simulation in assessing the validity of the estimates. The role of cyclical analysis is finally highlighted with regard to two aspects: (1) the business confidence has not a corresponding variable in the economic system—the validation can only be performed in comparison with correlated variables (e.g. IP, GDP); (2) confidence shows forecasting capability for the economic system.

Comparing the Efficiency of Sample Plans for Symmetric and Non-symmetric Distributions in Auditing

The aim of the sampling in auditing fields is to produce an upper confidence limits for mean or totals of unobserved mistakes on the observed values accounts (called book values) that are highly positively skewed. In the main auditing scenarios, it is possible to meet populations with a relatively large number of small accounts combined with high rate of mistakes, that means diffused low errors, or populations with a relatively large number of accounts combined with a small rate of mistakes, that means rare high errors. It seems interesting to evaluate whether the sampling method in relation to the different distribution shape of the population is able to distinguish the pure random error from the systematic error. In this work we will compare, by simulation, the mostly used audit sampling methods for different distribution shapes for book values with different hypothesis on the presence of the errors on the book values population.