Sergio Brasini

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.

Estimation of unobservable selection effects in on-line surveys through propensity score matching: An application to public acceptance of healthy eating policies

The use of model-based propensity scores as matching tools opens the way to the indirect estimation of mode-related measurement effects and selection effects in web surveys, including a component of selection that cannot be traced back to observable characteristics. By matching and comparing respondents from real independent surveys that use the same questionnaire, but different administration modes, it becomes possible to isolate the selection effect induced by unobservable (or unobserved) respondent characteristics. This study applies a stratification matching algorithm to compare a web survey from a proprietary panel with a computer-assisted telephone survey based on random digit-dialing. The experiment is run in two countries (UK and Italy) to check for consistencies across different cultures and different internet penetration rates. The application to the elicitation of support for healthy eating policies indicates large and significant measurement and selection effects. After controlling for differences in the observed characteristics of respondents and the intensity of internet use, findings suggest that web surveys record lower support and higher neutrality. Similarly, after controlling for administration mode and observed respondent characteristics, internet users are less likely to state support compared to non-users. This suggests that unobserved characteristics play a major role, and post-stratification weighting is not a sufficient countermeasure. As demonstrated by the cross-country comparison, rising internet penetration rates are not a guarantee against this type of error, as disparities in these unobserved characteristics are likely to increase at the same time.