Economics area

Riccardo Camboni
"Purchasing medical devices: The role of buyer competence and discretion"
Journal of Health Economics 

This paper investigates the price variability of standardized medical devices purchased by Italian Public Buyers (PBs). A semiparametric approach is used to recover the marginal cost of each device. Average prices vary substantially between PBs; we show that most of the difference between the purchase prices and estimated costs is associated with a PB fixed effect, which, in turn, is related to the institutional characteristics and size of the PB. Repeating the main estimation using device fixed effects yields similar results. Finally, an exogenous policy change, i.e. the termination of the mandatory reference price regime, is used to assess how discretion affects medical device procurement given the skills of each PB. Our results show that less PB discretion — i.e. when mandatory reference prices apply — determines efficiency gains and losses for low- and high-skilled PBs, respectively.

 

Francesco Campo
"Talents and cultures: Immigrant inventors and ethnic diversity in the age of mass migration"
Journal of the European Economic Association

We investigate the importance of co-ethnic networks and diversity in determining immigrant inventors’ settlements in the United States by following the location choices of thousands of them across counties during the Age of Mass Migration. To do so, we combine a unique United States Patent and Trademark Office historical patent dataset on immigrants who arrived as adults with Census data and exploit exogenous variation in both immigration flows and diversity induced by former settlements, WWI, and the 1920s Immigration Acts. We find that co-ethnic networks play an important role in attracting immigrant inventors. Yet, we also find that immigrant diversity acts as an additional significant pull factor. This is mainly due to externalities that foster immigrant inventors’ productivity.

Chiara Dal Bianco
"Disability insurance and the effects of return-to-work policies"
Review of Economics Dynamics

I provide a quantitative assessment of the labor market and welfare effects of return-to-work policies targeted at disability insurance (DI) recipients. I do so by estimating a life-cycle model in which individuals with different health evolving over time choose consumption, labor supply, and DI application. I find that a wage subsidy incentivizing return to work is welfare improving, and the willingness to pay for such reform is increasing in sickness and decreasing in wealth. This policy increases labor force participation of DI beneficiaries by 4.6 percentage points, and decreases the DI rate by 5.7 percentage points. A policy mandating a 10% yearly eligibility reassessment would decrease the welfare of individuals in bad health and poor economic condition, and force about 30% of the beneficiaries to exit the program, 54% of whom would return to work.

  Accounting / Management area

 

Anna Alexander
"Do institutional donors value social media activity and engagement? Empirical evidence on Italian non-profit grantees."
The British Accounting Review

The paper examines whether social media activity and engagement of non-profit organizations affect the financial support received from institutional donors and their relationship with the latter. Data are collected using a survey of non-profit grantees that received at least one grant from a Foundation of Banking Origin (FBO) in the Italian context, and are supplemented with social media (i.e., Facebook and Twitter) data on grantees. The results show that grantees with higher social media activity and engagement receive a larger amount of funding from the FBO. Moreover, grantees that report higher social media engagement are subject to less constraining oversight by the FBO. In additional analyses, we find that the beneficial effect of social media activity is driven by accountability-related content consistent with social media allowing for a more informal and dialogic accountability. Overall, our results provide novel evidence on the role of online sources of information, such as social media, on the grantor-grantee relationship and contribute to the recent debate on the importance of promoting digital transformation and stakeholder engagement in non-profits.

 

Giuseppe Danese
"Pledging one’s trustworthiness through gifts: An experiment"
Judgement and Decision Making

Ethnographers have recorded many instances of tokens donated as gifts to attract new partners or strengthen ties to existing ones. We study whether gifts are an effective pledge of the donor’s trustworthiness through an experiment modeled on the trust game. We vary whether the trustee can send a token before the trustor decides whether to transfer money; whether one of the tokens is rendered salient through experimental manipulations (a vote or an incentive-compatible rule of purchase for the tokens); and whether the subjects interact repeatedly or are randomly re-matched in each round. Tokens are frequently sent in all studies in which tokens are available, but repeated interaction, rather than gifts, is the leading behavioral driver in our data. In the studies with random pairs, trustors send significantly more points when the trustee has sent a token. Subjects in a fixed matching achieve comparable levels of trust and trustworthiness in the studies with and without tokens. The trustee’s decision to send a token is not predictive of the amount the trustee returns to the trustor. A token is used more sparingly whenever salient — a novel instance of endogenous value creation in the lab.

Amir Maghssudipour
"The role of multiple ties in knowledge networks: Complementarity in the Montefalco wine cluster"
Industrial Marketing Management

After decades of studies about pervasive, wide, and inclusive knowledge externalities and the advantages of being there, recent literature on management, industrial marketing, economic geography, regional studies, and related fields has stressed that knowledge spreads imperfectly, unevenly, and selectively within regional and cluster contexts. In this respect, little is known about the role played by heterogeneous knowledge ties among the same set of actors and to what extent they follow overlapping or different routes of exchanging knowledge. Thus, an investigation of multiple knowledge networks in clusters is a fundamental approach to interpret the reasons for innovation and economic performance.

With an original dataset comprised of data collected by surveys directly administered in local wineries in the Montefalco wine region of Italy, this paper aims to analyse the roles played by different local knowledge ties within a sector that is critically driven by the exchange of knowledge among economic actors. Social network analysis and exponential random graph modelling were applied to investigate the driving forces of the knowledge flows. The empirical results showed that economic and social ties positively affect the spread of knowledge, but the former has a higher magnitude impact than the latter. Moreover, they follow complementary routes of exchange rather than overlapping ones. We suggest that such a structure has implications for understanding the diffusion of knowledge and structures of innovation in cluster contexts.

 

  Winners

For the Economics area the winners are:

Francesco Campo
"Talents and cultures: Immigrant inventors and ethnic diversity in the age of mass migration"
Journal of the European Economic Association

We investigate the importance of co-ethnic networks and diversity in determining immigrant inventors’ settlements in the United States by following the location choices of thousands of them across counties during the Age of Mass Migration. To do so, we combine a unique United States Patent and Trademark Office historical patent dataset on immigrants who arrived as adults with Census data and exploit exogenous variation in both immigration flows and diversity induced by former settlements, WWI, and the 1920s Immigration Acts. We find that co-ethnic networks play an important role in attracting immigrant inventors. Yet, we also find that immigrant diversity acts as an additional significant pull factor. This is mainly due to externalities that foster immigrant inventors’ productivity.

Chiara Dal Bianco
"Disability insurance and the effects of return-to-work policies"
Review of Economics Dynamics

I provide a quantitative assessment of the labor market and welfare effects of return-to-work policies targeted at disability insurance (DI) recipients. I do so by estimating a life-cycle model in which individuals with different health evolving over time choose consumption, labor supply, and DI application. I find that a wage subsidy incentivizing return to work is welfare improving, and the willingness to pay for such reform is increasing in sickness and decreasing in wealth. This policy increases labor force participation of DI beneficiaries by 4.6 percentage points, and decreases the DI rate by 5.7 percentage points. A policy mandating a 10% yearly eligibility reassessment would decrease the welfare of individuals in bad health and poor economic condition, and force about 30% of the beneficiaries to exit the program, 54% of whom would return to work.

For the Accounting/Management area the winners are:

Anna Alexander
"Do institutional donors value social media activity and engagement? Empirical evidence on Italian non-profit grantees."
The British Accounting Review

The paper examines whether social media activity and engagement of non-profit organizations affect the financial support received from institutional donors and their relationship with the latter. Data are collected using a survey of non-profit grantees that received at least one grant from a Foundation of Banking Origin (FBO) in the Italian context, and are supplemented with social media (i.e., Facebook and Twitter) data on grantees. The results show that grantees with higher social media activity and engagement receive a larger amount of funding from the FBO. Moreover, grantees that report higher social media engagement are subject to less constraining oversight by the FBO. In additional analyses, we find that the beneficial effect of social media activity is driven by accountability-related content consistent with social media allowing for a more informal and dialogic accountability. Overall, our results provide novel evidence on the role of online sources of information, such as social media, on the grantor-grantee relationship and contribute to the recent debate on the importance of promoting digital transformation and stakeholder engagement in non-profits.

Amir Maghssudipour
"The role of multiple ties in knowledge networks: Complementarity in the Montefalco wine cluster"
Industrial Marketing Management

After decades of studies about pervasive, wide, and inclusive knowledge externalities and the advantages of being there, recent literature on management, industrial marketing, economic geography, regional studies, and related fields has stressed that knowledge spreads imperfectly, unevenly, and selectively within regional and cluster contexts. In this respect, little is known about the role played by heterogeneous knowledge ties among the same set of actors and to what extent they follow overlapping or different routes of exchanging knowledge. Thus, an investigation of multiple knowledge networks in clusters is a fundamental approach to interpret the reasons for innovation and economic performance.

With an original dataset comprised of data collected by surveys directly administered in local wineries in the Montefalco wine region of Italy, this paper aims to analyse the roles played by different local knowledge ties within a sector that is critically driven by the exchange of knowledge among economic actors. Social network analysis and exponential random graph modelling were applied to investigate the driving forces of the knowledge flows. The empirical results showed that economic and social ties positively affect the spread of knowledge, but the former has a higher magnitude impact than the latter. Moreover, they follow complementary routes of exchange rather than overlapping ones. We suggest that such a structure has implications for understanding the diffusion of knowledge and structures of innovation in cluster contexts.

  Economics area

Riccardo Camboni
"Purchasing medical devices: The role of buyer competence and discretion"
Journal of Health Economics 

This paper investigates the price variability of standardized medical devices purchased by Italian Public Buyers (PBs). A semiparametric approach is used to recover the marginal cost of each device. Average prices vary substantially between PBs; we show that most of the difference between the purchase prices and estimated costs is associated with a PB fixed effect, which, in turn, is related to the institutional characteristics and size of the PB. Repeating the main estimation using device fixed effects yields similar results. Finally, an exogenous policy change, i.e. the termination of the mandatory reference price regime, is used to assess how discretion affects medical device procurement given the skills of each PB. Our results show that less PB discretion — i.e. when mandatory reference prices apply — determines efficiency gains and losses for low- and high-skilled PBs, respectively.

 

Chiara Dal Bianco
"The effect of work disability on the job involvement of older workers" 
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

This paper analyzes the effect of work disability on the job involvement of workers living in Europe. We exploit objective health indicators and anchoring vignettes to enhance the comparability across individuals. Individuals’ evaluations of their health-related work limitations are found to be mildly affected by justification bias but to depend on individual heterogeneity in reporting behaviour. Work disability significantly reduces the job involvement of workers.

 

Giuseppe Danese
"One person’s trash is another person’s treasure: In search of an efficient property regime for waste in the Global South"
Water Management

Empirical work conducted by an NGO shows that laws about access to waste are a central concern for waste pickers in the Global South. I show in this paper that any property regime that tries to exclude the waste pickers from accessing waste is associated with high transaction costs. I defend the thesis that the res nullius (no one's property) regime, complemented by waste pickers' organizations, regulates the waste sector efficiently in the Global South.

 

Edoardo Grillo
"Economic and social-class voting in a model of redistribution with social concerns"
Journal of the European Economic Association

We investigate how social status concerns affect preferences for redistribution. Social status is given by an individual's relative standing in two dimensions: consumption and social class. Redistribution modifies the weights of these two dimensions. As a result, some members of the working class may oppose redistribution, while some members of the socio-economic elites may favor it. This increases polarization concerning redistributive policies and gives rise to interclass coalitions of voters that, despite different monetary incentives, support the same tax rate. 

 

Leonardo Madio/Francesco Principe
"Do-It-Yourself medicine? The impact of light cannabis liberalization on prescription drugs"
Journal of Health Economics

Governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about the booming use of CBD (cannabidiol) products. However, we know little about the impact of their liberalization. We study a unique case of unintended liberalization of a CBD-based product (light cannabis) that occurred in Italy in 2017. Using unique and high-frequency data on prescription drug sales and by exploiting the staggered local availability of the new product in each Italian province, we document a significant substitution effect between light cannabis and anxiolytics, sedatives, opioids, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. Results are informative for regulators and suggest that bans on light cannabis use would disregard the needs of patients to seek effective reliefs of their symptoms.

 

Alessia Russo
"Youth Enfranchisement, Political Responsiveness, and Education Expenditure: Evidence from the US" 
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 

We examine the link between the political participation of the young and fiscal policies in the United States. We generate exogenous variation in participation using the passage of preregistration laws, which allow the young to register before being eligible to vote. After documenting that preregistration promotes youth enfranchisement, we show that preregistration shifts state government spending toward higher education, the type of spending for which the young have the strongest preference.

  Accounting / Management area

 

Simone Carmine
"Reviewing Paradox Theory in Corporate Sustainability Toward a Systems Perspective"
Journal of Business Ethics

Paradox theory has recently emerged as a promising way to approach the complexity of corporate sustainability. However, the fuzziness in the empirical use of the concept of “paradox” and the absence of a systems perspective limits its potential. In this paper, we perform a systematic review of the empirical literature related to paradox and sustainability. Our analysis provides a comprehensive account of the uses of the construct - which allows the categorization of the literature into three distinct research streams: 1) paradoxical tensions, 2) paradoxical frame/thinking, and 3) paradoxical actions/strategies. Further, by adopting a system perspective, we propose a theoretical framework that considers possible interconnections across the identified paradoxical meanings and different levels of analysis and discuss key research gaps emerging.

 

Ambra Galeazzo
"Organizational and Perceived Learning in the Workplace: A Multilevel Perspective on Employees’ Problem Solving"
Organization Science

This research draws attention to the multilevel role of learning on employees’ systematic problem solving (SPS) behavior, which aims to prevent the recurrence of a problem.  We highlighted that learning occurs through the organizational and perceived mechanisms of knowledge articulation and knowledge codification. Compared to organizational knowledge articulation (OKA) and knowledge codification (OKC), learning captured through the perceived mechanisms of knowledge articulation (PKA) and knowledge codification (PKC) supposes employees take an active part in the learning processes and interpret them differently. Employing a multilevel structural equation modeling on a sample of 383 shop floor employees in 52 plants, our findings indicate that OKC affects SPS, while OKA affects OKC. Moreover, results show that both PKA and PKC have strong positive effects on SPS. This study expands the understanding of the role of problem solving in routine evolution.

 

Alessandra Tognazzo
"Family Business Leaders’ Metaphors and Firm Performance: Exploring the “Roots” and “Shoots” of Symbolic Meanings" 
Family Business Review

To investigate the complex dynamics when family members with differing perceptions and interpretations of reality jointly lead their family business, this research adopts an epistemic-operative interview technique using Morgan’s images of organization. We explore how family leaders’ root metaphors, which are symbolic frames that help understand individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, are linked to family businesses’ behavior and performance. Analyzing six Italian family hotels, we derive four structures of family symbolic meanings and explain how and why relationships and innovation are mechanisms through which firm performance is related and connected to the offshoots of the meanings of family leaders’ root metaphors.

  Winners

For the Economics area the winners are:

Alessia Russo
"Youth Enfranchisement, Political Responsiveness, and Education Expenditure: Evidence from the US" 
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 

We examine the link between the political participation of the young and fiscal policies in the United States. We generate exogenous variation in participation using the passage of preregistration laws, which allow the young to register before being eligible to vote. After documenting that preregistration promotes youth enfranchisement, we show that preregistration shifts state government spending toward higher education, the type of spending for which the young have the strongest preference.

Edoardo Grillo
"Economic and social-class voting in a model of redistribution with social concerns"
Journal of the European Economic Association

We investigate how social status concerns affect preferences for redistribution. Social status is given by an individual's relative standing in two dimensions: consumption and social class. Redistribution modifies the weights of these two dimensions. As a result, some members of the working class may oppose redistribution, while some members of the socio-economic elites may favor it. This increases polarization concerning redistributive policies and gives rise to interclass coalitions of voters that, despite different monetary incentives, support the same tax rate. 

For the Accounting/Management area the winners are:

Ambra Galeazzo
"Organizational and Perceived Learning in the Workplace: A Multilevel Perspective on Employees’ Problem Solving"
Organization Science

This research draws attention to the multilevel role of learning on employees’ systematic problem solving (SPS) behavior, which aims to prevent the recurrence of a problem.  We highlighted that learning occurs through the organizational and perceived mechanisms of knowledge articulation and knowledge codification. Compared to organizational knowledge articulation (OKA) and knowledge codification (OKC), learning captured through the perceived mechanisms of knowledge articulation (PKA) and knowledge codification (PKC) supposes employees take an active part in the learning processes and interpret them differently. Employing a multilevel structural equation modeling on a sample of 383 shop floor employees in 52 plants, our findings indicate that OKC affects SPS, while OKA affects OKC. Moreover, results show that both PKA and PKC have strong positive effects on SPS. This study expands the understanding of the role of problem solving in routine evolution.

 

Alessandra Tognazzo
"Family Business Leaders’ Metaphors and Firm Performance: Exploring the “Roots” and “Shoots” of Symbolic Meanings" 
Family Business Review

To investigate the complex dynamics when family members with differing perceptions and interpretations of reality jointly lead their family business, this research adopts an epistemic-operative interview technique using Morgan’s images of organization. We explore how family leaders’ root metaphors, which are symbolic frames that help understand individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, are linked to family businesses’ behavior and performance. Analyzing six Italian family hotels, we derive four structures of family symbolic meanings and explain how and why relationships and innovation are mechanisms through which firm performance is related and connected to the offshoots of the meanings of family leaders’ root metaphors.