This paper investigates the role of language in determining the degree of substitutability between foreign and native workers. To this end, we focus on Switzerland, an immigration-receiving country with four official languages spoken, three of which in common with bordering countries. We modify the model proposed by Ottaviano and Peri (2012) to account for the linguistic background of native and immigrant workers. We find that language plays a central role in determining the elasticity of substitution between foreign and native workers and accounts for much of their imperfect substitutability. These findings are robust to a number of robustness checks, such as different specifications of the model structure and the inclusion of cross-border workers. Then, we compute the total wage change for native and foreign workers caused by new immigration in flows. In the long run, the average percentage wage changes for native and foreign workers are quite small and not significant.
In this article, we study politicians’ – rather than voters’ – responses to the main political scandal in Italian recent history (Tangentopoli), and overcome endogeneity concerns by analysing the local implications of this national corruption scandal. We find that local politicians withdraw support for incumbents in parties hit by Tangentopoli – inducing increased political instability in such municipalities. Moreover, politicians in parties hit by the scandal exhibit higher rates of party switching and lower re-running rates. Scandals thus appear to decrease the value of the party “brand”, and become transmitted across politicians and levels of government via partisan cues.
This dissertation focuses on the barriers that authenticity brings to entrepreneurial outcomes such as entry of new organizations, product diversification, and introduction of new products in traditional industries. Advancing theory on organizational authenticity and geographical communities, this thesis argues that authenticity is not only an asset that organizations can choose but also a barrier for entrepreneurial attempts and the renewal of an industry. The main argument is that when community members seek after authenticity and local traditions, the establishment of new organizations and the introduction of new products can threaten the maintenance of community traditions and regional identity. In addition, geographical proximity between producers and consumers enables the development of a tightly knit fabric of relationships between market actors that are difficult to overcome by entrepreneurs. This thesis further elaborates on the resources upon which producers can rely on to overcome these constraints. In particular, family ownership and product naming strategies prove resourceful when introducing new products in traditional industries. The Franconian beer industry (Northern Bavaria, Germany) is the empirical context where I test these arguments. Being one of the oldest industrial agglomerations in Europe, the Franconian beer industry stands for a highly traditional cluster of breweries where producers and community members have a strong interest in preserving their authenticity. Founding rates as well as the product portfolio of more than 300 breweries are observed for the period 1989-2012.
In my dissertation I aim to explore the impacts of work-related mobility on job, family life and personal well-being of the travelling employees. To do so, three studies have been conducted with the purpose to investigate business travel behavioral patterns and impacts of work-related mobility on various life domains of the three segments, namely frequent corporate business travelers, expatriates and travelling academics, for whom the issues of travel stress and work-life balance are of great relevance. The first study focuses on the analysis of business travel impacts, both positive and negative ones, on the professional and private life of the 'road warriors', investigating the role of frequent work-related journeys in deteriorating work-life balance of the travelling employees. Having analyzed benefits and downsides of frequent business trips I address the possibility to enhance travel experience and improve employees' satisfaction and work productivity by means of providing travelers with the option to get involved into leisure life of visited destinations. The second paper examines factors that determine the degree of psychological success of expatriates and their satisfaction with international assignments overall, analyzing a wide array of variables from job, family and personal life domains. The research addresses the expatriation theme from the side of international assignees, providing implications for HRM departments directed towards improvement of expatriation experience. The last study sheds light on travel behavior of academics, investigating modes of travel and types of work-related trips undertaken by university employees, along with their attitude to travel and the influence of business trips on their work-life balance. The research demonstrates which trip features, work and non-work variables, as well as socio-demographic characteristics do matter when it comes to satisfaction with travel. The results of the afore-mentioned studies are relevant in terms of both theoretical contributions to the under-researched field of business travel, as well as practical implications. Apart from adding to the existing knowledge in the mobility field, the research outcomes demonstrate the necessity to carefully manage manifold aspects of business travel and expatriation in order to improve satisfaction of mobile employees with their trips of shorter or longer duration. In particular, the research sheds some light on work-life balance issues connected with travel, contributing to 'work-private life' conflict elimination and highlighting the crucial role of organizations in solving the existing problems.
Over the past 2 decades, internet use has become increasingly more a part of our every-day lives. We communicate with our friends and colleagues using the internet, we work using the internet, we also shop using the internet. We learn and increase our knowledge from information available on the internet. While on the one hand, we advance from the instant access to online contexts individualistically, on the other hand we participate as members of a community for example when we share our experiences online. The ever growing use of the internet and its flourish in new segments of our daily life brings significant changes not only to us, the individuals, but also to the organizations. In the past decade, there has been a shift in the field of organizational theory considering the environment of organizations. Current approaches extend the horizon of the classical view proclaiming that organizational environment is not only constituted by rival organizations but also their audience members. Several studies found evidence that audience members' perceptions and behavior influence organizational success. For example, category-spanning organizations on average suffer from social and economic disadvantages in markets because they cannot meet the expectations of their audiences. This shift towards understanding the effect of audience responses on the organizational outcome motivates my dissertation. More specifically, I study how individuals on-line behavior affects organizations. I analyze three aspects of internet mediated communication and their consequences to the organization. Firstly, I address the need to compare how traditional face-to-face communication compares to the modern email communication (Chapter 2). Studies tend to take it for granted, that on-line information exchange mirrors it's off-line counterpart at the work place. Although, there are great advantages in the availability of email data, as it retains communication in its completeness, it does not fully correspond to previously studied relations, like friendship or advice seeking. The characteristics of on-line communications also differ from off-line information exchange. Employees respect divisional and hierarchical boundaries in face-to-face conversations while these boundaries are blurred out within the email exchange. Secondly, I analyze a special type of on-line behavior, the on-line word-of-mouth communication among audience members (Chapter 3). Online reviews play an increasingly important role in shaping organizational performance. Drawing conclusions on how customers perceive quality and typicality of a producer and how it manifests in on-line ratings increase the predictability of producer success. Thirdly, I approach audience behavior from a collective behavior perspective (Chapter 4). Specifically, I analyze audience dynamics with threshold models. Doing so I address the micro level mechanism of how audience behavior creates certain macro level patterns of producer success rather than assuming that they are simple aggregates of individual characteristics.
My thesis considers new latent factor models, and their estimation methodologies, suitable for settings relatively unexplored in the econometric literature as (i) a nonlinear model for the joint dynamics of a large cross-sectional distribution of asset returns, and the persistence of the ranks of the individuals inside it; (ii) approximate linear latent factor models for large panels of mixed-frequency data; and (iii) small scale state space models featuring multiple time series with stochastic volatility and observed at different frequencies. The thesis is articulated in four chapters: Chapter 1 summarizes the motivation and the objectives of the thesis, while the remaining three chapters correspond to three different articles. Chapter 2 presents a new type of asset allocation strategies based on a novel dynamic model of the cross-sectional distribution of returns and the ranks of assets inside the same cross-sectional distribution. These strategies are implemented on a large panel of US stocks, and are shown to perform well compared to traditional asset allocation strategies. Chapter 3 proposes a new class of approximate latent factor models suitable for large panels of data observed at different frequencies. An empirical application uncovers the common components of monthly data on output growth rates of the US industrial production sectors, and the yearly output growth rates of all the remaining sectors of the US economy, mainly services. Chapter 4 introduces indirect inference estimators for state space models featuring mixed frequency observables and stochastic volatility, and considers an application to forecasting quarterly European GDP using monthly macroeconomic indicators.
This thesis analyzes different theoretical and empirical aspects related to the use of the information in asset pricing. As a main innovation I extend the asset pricing literature proposing a new highly flexible technique for the estimation of the markets subjective distribution of future returns. Applying this technique to different problems I answer to some long-lasting puzzles present in literature. The contribution of this project to the literature is two-fold: first, in line with the new findings of Ross (2015) but from a fully different prospective I propose a new technique to estimate the market's subjective distribution of future returns using, jointly, stock and options data. Second, after studying the theoretical reason behind the superiority of the proposed technique, I use it for different empirical applications.
Profit and its investment in productive activities lie at the heart of modern monetary economies. Indeed, it is thanks to profit investment that fixed capital is produced and used by companies to increase the number of consumption goods and, ultimately, to increase the wealth of households. Yet, despite economists’ full understanding of corporate gains from a microeconomic standpoint, economists are far from sharing a common theory of macroeconomic profit. In this book, an assessment is made of profit theories since 1874, the year that marked the advent of so-called mainstream economics. Following an analysis of bank money, a discrete-time theory of profit formation and economic growth is then proposed. Possibly the main conclusion of this inquiry, monetary authorities should distinguish distributive payments from those transactions that define the creation of new income. Thus, a reform of the system of national payments is advocated, aiming to keep record of all production-based wealth.
The main objective I pursue in this thesis is to better understand how different factors may independently and in combination influence retailers' ordering decisions under different supply chain structures (single agent and multi agent), different demand uncertainty (deterministic and stochastic), and different interaction among retailers (no interaction, competition and cooperation). I developed three different studies where I build on different formal management model and then run multiple behavioral studies to better understand subjects’ behavior. The first study analyzes order amplification in a single-supplier single-retailer supply chain. I used a behavioral experiment to test retailers’ orders under different ordering delays and different times to build supplier’s capacity. Results provide (i) a better understanding of the endogenous dynamics leading to retailers’ ordering amplification, and (ii) a description of subjects’ biases and deviation from optimal trajectories; despite subjects have full information about the system structure. The second study analyzes how order amplification can also take place when there is fierce retailer competition and limited supplier capacity. I study how different factors (different time to build supplier capacity, different levels of competition among retailers, different magnitudes of supply shortage and different allocation mechanisms) may independently and in combination influence retailers’ order in a system with two retailers under supply competition. Results show that (i) the bullwhip effect persists even when subjects do not have incentives to deviate, (ii) subjects amplify their orders in an attempt to build an unnecessary safety stock to respond to potential deviations from the other retailers, and (iii) retailers’ underperformance varies with the allocation mechanism used by the supplier. In the last study, I analyze retailers’ orders in a system where there is uncertainty in the final customer demand. I experimentally explore the effect of transshipments among retailers in a single-supplier multi-retailer supply chain. Specifically, I explore retailers’ orders under different profit and communication conditions. In addition, I integrate analytical and behavioral models to improve supply chain performance. Results show that (i) the persistence of common biases in a newsvendor problem (pull-to-center, demand chasing, loss aversion, psychological disutility), (ii) communication could improve coordination and may reduce demand chasing behavior, (iii) supply chain performance increases with the use of behavioral strategies embedded within a traditional optimization model, and (iv) dynamic heuristics improve overall coordination, outperforming a simple Nash Equilibrium strategy.
