Making Boards Effective: An Empirical Examination of Board Task Performance

Despite the increasing attention of management scholars to boards of directors, there is still scant evidence on the antecedents of board task performance. The lack of significant results seems to be due to some theoretical and methodological choices followed by scholars, i.e. the almost exclusive reliance on agency theory and the use of demographic data. Following the call for dismantling the fortresses dominating past studies, this paper contributes to opening the 'black box' of boards of directors, developing a conceptual model that considers the impact of board members' diversity, commitment and critical debate on board task effectiveness in performing its service and control tasks. We collected primary data through a questionnaire survey, and we tested the model controlling for board, firm and industry characteristics. Our findings suggest that (i) the predictors we identified, and particularly the board members' commitment, are far more important than board demographics to predict board task performance; (ii) firm and industry contexts exert a significant influence on board task performance; (iii) predictors have a different impact on specific sets of tasks. Thus, our findings support the idea that several board characteristics and contingencies at both industry and firm level must be acknowledged in board design.     

Fertility in Advanced Societies: A Review of Research

This paper provides a review of fertility research in advanced societies, societies in which birth control is the default option. The central aim is to provide a comprehensive review that summarizes how contemporary research has explained ongoing and expected fertility changes across time and space (i.e., cross- and within-country heterogeneity). A secondary aim is to provide an analytical synthesis of the core determinants of fertility, grouping them within the analytical level in which they operate. Determinants are positioned at the individual and/or couple level (micro-level), social relationships and social networks (meso-level); and, by cultural and institutional settings (macro-level). The focus is both on the quantum and on the tempo of fertility, with a particular focus on the postponement of childbearing. The review incorporates both theoretical and empirical contributions, with attention placed on empirically tested research and whether results support or falsify existing theoretical expectations. Attention is also devoted to causality and endogeneity issues. The paper concludes with an outline of the current challenges and opportunities for future research.     

Electing a parliament

We present a model where a society elects candidates belonging to two parties to a national parliament. The electoral rule determines the seats distribution between the two parties. The policy outcome is a function of the number of seats the two parties win in the election. We analyze two electoral rules, multidistrict majority and single district proportional. We prove that under both systems there is a unique pure strategy perfect equilibrium outcome. We compare the outcomes under the two systems.     

Predicting the Trend of Well-Being in Germany: How Much Do Comparisons, Adaptation and Sociability Matter?

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’ well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes over time of income, demographics and social capital. The increase in social capital predicts the largest positive change in subjective well-being. Income growth, also predicts a substantial change in subjective well-being, but it is compensated for about three fourths by the joint negative predictions due to income comparison and income adaptation. Finally, we find that aging of the population predicts the largest negative change in subjective well-being. This result appears to hinge on the large loss of satisfaction experienced by individuals in old age.     

Performing new identities: the community language of post-crisis Italian migrants in London

ABSTRACT

After the 2008 global crisis, Italy has experienced a relevant resumption of emigration. Tens of thousands of young Italians have chosen London as their favourite destination, giving rise to a new Italian community in the city. This article focuses on the transformation of migrants’ national identity and on a distinctive device of identity expression: language. Sample cases, extracted from a dataset collected for an original doctoral project, are used to explain how the insertion of English elements in speakers’ native language become the expression of the loss of pure national identity and of the renegotiation of transnational and migratory identities.     

Kind of Black: The Musicians' Labour Market in Italy

It is estimated that only 5 per cent of musicians in Italy are regularly employed. In an attempt at understanding such a peculiar situation, we build a theoretical model of the musicians' labour market in which we embed the main institutional features of the Italian system. The presence of taxation encourages the formation of a black labour market for musicians and discourages talented agents from becoming full‐time musicians in all second‐best economies. In Italy both tendencies are particularly strong, and exacerbated by the peculiarities of the pension system for musicians. These inefficiencies might be corrected by a twofold policy: the reform of the pension system, highly desirable but unlikely to be politically feasible in the current Italian institutional setting, and the introduction of a sufficiently large unemployment benefit for musicians, step that has a general interest for any second‐best economy and not only for the case of the musicians' labour market, and that might instead be viable under certain circumstances.     

OIL AND THE MACROECONOMY: A QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

We model an open economy where macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to oil supply shocks, as well as aggregate demand and supply shocks generated domestically and abroad. We use several robust predictions of the model to identify five fundamental shocks underlying the fluctuations of the (real) oil price, the US activity and the global business cycle. The estimates show that supply shocks generated in the global economy explain the largest fraction of the oil price fluctuations, about four times more than canonical oil supply shocks. The correlation between oil prices and the US activity varies with the type of shock.     

IMMIGRATION,JOBS, AND EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION: EVIDENCE FROM EUROPE BEFORE AND DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on 15 Western European countries during the 1996–2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking manual‐routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more “complex” (abstract and communication) jobs. This job upgrade was associated to a 0.7% increase in native wages for a doubling of the immigrants' share. These results are robust to the use of an IV strategy based on past settlement of immigrants across European countries. The job upgrade slowed but did not come to a halt during the Great Recession. We also document the labor market flows behind it: the complexity of jobs offered to new native hires was higher relative to the complexity of lost jobs. Finally, we find evidence that such reallocation was larger in countries with more flexible labor laws.     

SALES AND COLLUSION IN A MARKET WITH STORAGE

Sales are a widespread and well‐known phenomenon documented in several product markets. This paper presents a novel rationale for sales that does not rely on consumer heterogeneity, or on any form of randomness to explain such periodic price fluctuations. The analysis is carried out in the context of a simple repeated price competition model, and establishes that firms must periodically reduce prices in order to sustain collusion when goods are storable and the market is large. The largest equilibrium profits are characterized at any market size. A trade‐off between the size of the industry and its profits arises. Sales foster collusion, by magnifying the inter‐temporal links in consumers' decisions.