From enforcement to financial reporting controls (FRCs): a country-level composite indicator

Journal of Management and Governance - This paper proposes a broad measure of the country-level intensity of the main monitoring activities that are likely to affect financial reporting quality....     

Public corruption: A study across regions in Italy

This work explores the determinants of public corruption using a regional panel dataset on crimes perpetrated in Italy by public officials against the public administration in combination with a set of demographic and socio-economic variables. The results suggest that both the size and the composition of public spending at the local level explain corruption. We also find that regions where social capital is higher are more likely to face a lower incidence of corruption crimes. Moreover, regions which have historically placed less importance on rooting out corruption may be stuck in a vicious circle of higher levels of corruption.     

Between Supply and Demand: Intermediaries,Social Networks and the Construction of Quality in the Italian Wine Industry

The working of markets implies decisions basedon incomplete and costly information; as aconsequence, the mechanisms through which thisinformation is produced and made available toactors are very important. Most prominent amongsuch mechanisms is the role of intermediaryactors that do not make production orconsumption choices, but influence thesechoices by sorting products into categories. Wefocus on intermediary actors that expressevaluations of products, as a mechanism thatfosters the convergence of supply and demand inexchanges. Personal social networks thatconnect supply and demand perform this rolewhen exchanges are bound to narrow contexts.Intermediaries replace these ties in massmarkets; in such broader context socialnetworks are found here to play an importantrole in the relationships between intermediaryactors and the supply side of the market.The empirical context of our work is theItalian wine industry, characterized by theimportance of wine guides that influence thebehaviors of producers and consumers byevaluating the quality of wines. Theambiguities intrinsic to this evaluationdescribe the grey area within which differentdefinitions of quality are equally legitimate.We analyze the quality ratings of 967 Italianwines reported by the two most prominentItalian wine guides in the period 1996–2000.Our goal is to show that, given the intrinsicambiguity involved in wine evaluation, thereare systematic differences in the scoresassigned to products, and that the pattern ofthese differences reflects variations in thesocial networks that connect the two guides tothe supply side of the market.     

Ethnic diversity and well-being

This paper investigates how ethnic diversity, measured by immigrants’ nationalities, influences the well-being of the host country. Using panel data from Germany from 1998 to 2012, we find a positive effect of ethnic diversity on the well-being of German natives. Our finding is robust to alternative definitions of ethnic diversity and to the non-random selection of natives and immigrants into regions. The positive effect of ethnic diversity is stronger for immigrant groups that are culturally and economically closer to Germany. Consistent with this result, we document the existence of two mechanisms explaining the influence of ethnic diversity on well-being: productivity—as captured by immigrants’ skills and assimilation—and social capital—particularly in relation to the creation of a multicultural environment.     

Remittances and well-being among rural-to-urban migrants in China

The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the relationship between sending remittances and the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China, we estimate models in which a SWB measure is regressed on the level of remittances, finding a sizeable positive correlation. The estimates vary with the socio-economic characteristics of migrants, migration experience and the diversity of family arrangements. As a complementary objective, we use SWB measures to elicit the motivations behind remittances, finding evidence that both altruistic and contractual motivations are at work among rural-to-urban migrants in China.