Financial intermediaries can choose the extent to which they want to be active investors, providing valuable services like advice, support and corporate governance. We examine the determinants of the decision to become an active financial intermediary using a hand-collected dataset on European venture capital deals. We find organizational specialization to be a key driver. Venture firms which are independent and focused on venture capital alone get more involved with their companies. The human capital of venture partners is another key driver of active financial intermediation. Venture firms whose partners have prior business experience or a scientific education provide more support and governance. These results have implications for prevailing views of financial intermediation, which largely abstract from issues of specialization and human capital.
In this Paper we estimate the dynamic relationship between resources used in R&D by some OECD countries and their innovation output as measured by patent applications. We first estimate a long-run cointegration relation using recently developed tests and panel estimation techniques. We find that the stock of knowledge of a country, it’s R&D resources and the stock of international knowledge move together in the long run. Then, imposing this long-run relation across variables we analyse the impulse response of new ideas to a shock to R&D or to a shock to innovation by estimating an error correction mechanism. We find that internationally generated ideas have a very significant impact in helping innovation in a country. As a consequence, a positive shock to innovation in a large country as the US has, both in the short and in the long run, a significant positive effect on the innovation of all other countries.
Journal Article The International Dynamics of R&D and Innovation in the Long Run and in the Short Run Get access Laura Bottazzi, Laura Bottazzi University of Bologna Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Giovanni Peri Giovanni Peri Univrsity of California, Davis and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 117, Issue 518, March 2007, Pages 486–511, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02027.x Published: 05 April 2007 Article history Received: 26 August 2003 Accepted: 20 January 2006 Published: 05 April 2007
In this paper we analyze how the creation of a single currency regime changes the strategic relationship between policy makers, both within and across countries. in particular we look at the role of cross-country externalities and lack of commitment. When labor taxation is excessive, due to terms of trade externalities, the ECB may be tempted to raise inflation above the flexible exchange rate equilibrium in order to induce governments to substitute seignorage for income taxes. Therefore the equilibrium rate of inflation in EMU typically exceed the flexible exchange rate level. When the ECB cannot credibly commit to inflation, multiple equilibria may arise, where inflation is excessive and labor taxes too low (Workers' Europe), or viceversa, where taxation is excessive and inflation too low (Bankers' Europe). Finally, if the ECB cannot commit to a fixed scheme for redistributing seignorage, the outcome is excess inflation and suboptimal taxation. Both governments anticipate that the ECB will redistribute seignorage in favor of the country with lower tax revenue, and tend to lower tax rates accordingly.
The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of research externalities across space, in generating innovation. We do so by using R&D and patent data for eighty-six European Regions in the 1977-1995 period. We find that spillovers exist for regions within a distance of 300 Km from each other. The estimates are robust to simultaneity, omitted variable bias, different specifications of distance functions, country and border effects. The size of these spillovers is small, though. Doubling R&D spending in a region would increase the output of new ideas in other regions within 300 Km only by 2-3%, while it would increase the innovation of the region itself by 80-90%. Given the small size and the limited range of diffusion, we interpret these externalities as the result of local diffusion of non-codified knowledge, embodied in people and spreading via personal contacts. This interpretation is reinforced by the finding that the spillovers are somewhat weaker across national borders.
We model the joint financial decisions of a bank, a supplier, and their customers when firms have access to a factoring service to support a trade credit agreement. To explore the nexus between firms' capital structure and the intensity of their financial and productive inter- linkages we develop a structural model that integrates a 'supply chain of credit' with a model of 'downstream competition' for customers and rationalizes the emergence of the granular networks that shape firms risk exposure. We exploit information from a proprietary dataset to identify a number of empirical regularities that correlate the use of factoring services of- fered by the bank with customers' and suppliers' capital structure determinants.
In this paper we analyse how the creation of a single currency regime changes the strategic relationship between policy-makers, both within and across countries. In particular we look at the role of cross-country externalities and lack of commitment. When labour taxation is excessive, due to terms of trade externalities, the European Central Bank (ECB) may be tempted to raise inflation above the flexible exchange rate equilibrium in order to induce governments to substitute seignorage for income taxes. Therefore the equilibrium rate of inflation in EMU typically exceed the flexible exchange rate level. When the ECB cannot credibly commit to inflation, multiple equilibria may arise, where inflation is excessive and labour taxes too low (Workers’ Europe), or vice versa, where taxation is excessive and inflation too low (Bankers’ Europe). Finally, if the ECB cannot commit to a fixed scheme for redistributing seignorage, the outcome is excess inflation and suboptimal taxation. Both governments anticipate that the ECB will redistribute seignorage in favour of the country with lower tax revenue, and tend to lower tax rates accordingly.
This paper studies the resilience of inter-ethnic marriages in Italy through the lenses of marriage duration by means of survival and treatment-effect analyses. Our main findings are that inter-ethnic marriages have a significantly higher risk of separation even when we control for social and economic characteristics of the spouses; however, when we restrict the analysis to more recent marriages, we observe that co- and inter-ethnic marriages converge in longevity. Finally, we find evidence of self-selection into inter-ethnic marriages. Overall our findings points to a society that is becoming increasingly open to cultural and ethnic diversity, as well as more secular.
We examine gender differences in financial literacy among high school students in Italy using data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).Gender differences in financial literacy are large among the young in Italy.They are present in all regions and are particularly severe in the South and the Islands.Combining the rich PISA data with a variety of other indicators, we provide a thorough analysis of the potential determinants of the gender gap in financial literacy.We find that parental background, in particular the role of mothers, matters for the financial knowledge of girls.Moreover, we show that the social and cultural environment in which girls and boys live plays a crucial role in explaining gender differences.We also show that history matters: Medieval commercial hubs and the nuclear family structure created conditions favorable to the transformation of the role of women in society, and shaped gender differences in financial literacy as well.
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