Firm-level training in local economic systems: Complementarities in production and firm innovation strategies

The paper presents a conceptual review over the main aspects concerning the role of human capital investments and training activities within production processes, followed by empirical evidence on two local economic systems in Northern Italy, based on recent survey data. Theoretical and empirical considerations are brought together in order to provide new insights on the role of training and the factors associated to training activities at firm level.The potential driving factors of training here analysed compounds structural characteristics, labour demand dynamics, human resource management practices, workforce features, and firm performances. We observe that training activities emerge positively associated with high-performance practices, innovative labour demand features, workforce skill level, firm size, and are affected by labour flexibility in various directions. Empirical evidence confirms most previous results but also adds further important insights. The analysis suggests that a widening gap, between few innovatively evolving and many stagnant firms, could characterise the future dynamics of the Region. The high relevance of structural variables, labour demand factors and HRM/innovation practices shows that regional industrial policies and labour policies should be jointly implemented for increasing potential firm productivity. This is a key concern for the current debate on local systems economic development in the European and Italian environment.     

Higher education outcomes, graduate employment and university performance indicators

Summary.  Official employment-related performance indicators in UK higher education are based on the population of students responding to the 'First destination supplement' (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the full population of leavers from each institution. University leavers who do not obtain qualifications and those who do not respond to the FDS are not included within the official analysis. We compare an employment-related performance indicator based on those students who responded to the FDS with alternative approaches which address the potential non-random nature of this subgroup of university leavers.     

Ranking Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism Scenarios: The Italian Case

A quantitative criterion for ranking the different scenarios of nuclear and radiological terrorism has been developed. The aim of the model is not to predict terroristic events but only to indicate which scenario has the higher utility from the point of view of a terroristic organization in terms of balance between factors favoring and discouraging the attack, respectively. All these factors were quantified according to a scoring system that takes into account the logarithmic relationship between perceptions and stimuli. The criterion was applied to several scenarios, each of which was modeled in a simple but not trivial way in order to estimate the expected damage in terms of probable life losses from both radiative and nonradiative effects. The outcome from the ranking method indicates that the attractive scenario appears to be the detonation of a low yield improvised nuclear device in the metropolitan area of a major city.     

Short-Term GDP Forecasting With a Mixed-Frequency Dynamic Factor Model With Stochastic Volatility

In this article, we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model in which the disturbances of both the latent common factor and of the idiosyncratic components have time-varying stochastic volatilities. We use the model to investigate business cycle dynamics in the euro area and present three sets of empirical results. First, we evaluate the impact of macroeconomic releases on point and density forecast accuracy and on the width of forecast intervals. Second, we show how our setup allows to make a probabilistic assessment of the contribution of releases to forecast revisions. Third, we examine point and density out of sample forecast accuracy. We find that introducing stochastic volatility in the model contributes to an improvement in both point and density forecast accuracy. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Measuring Active Citizenship through the Development of a Composite Indicator

This article defines Active Citizenship within a European context as a broad range of value based participation. It develops a framework for measuring this phenomenon which combines the four dimensions of Protest and Social Change, Community Life, Representative Democracy and Democratic values. The European Social Survey 2002 is used to populate the framework as this survey provided the best data coverage available and covered 19 European Countries. In total 61 indicators were selected. A composite indicator (CI), The Active Citizenship Composite Indicator (ACCI), is built using the framework provided and using experts’ weights. In addition, the robustness of the results is tested using sensitivity analysis. The limitations to the ACCI are explained in terms of the limitation of the data availability in particular concerning the new forms of participation and less organised forms of participation. Nevertheless, ACCI proved to be statistically robust and reliable and proved to be a useful tool for monitoring levels of citizenship in Europe. The results of ACCI exhibit interesting and quite distinct regional patterns. The results showed that the Nordic countries, and in particular Sweden, have the highest rate of Active Citizenship, followed by Central Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries. Mediterranean countries are next followed by Eastern European countries that close the ranking.

Business visits,knowledge diffusion and productivity

We investigate whether labor mobility can be a distinct source of growth by studying the productivity impact of business visits (BVs), vis-à-vis that of other well-known drivers of productivity enhancement. Our analysis uses an unbalanced panel—covering on average 16 sectors per year in ten countries during the period 1998–2011—which combines unique and novel data on BVs sourced from the US National Business Travel Association with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on R&D and capital formation. We find that mobility through BVs is an effective mechanism to improve productivity, being about half that obtained by investing in R&D. This relevant finding invites viewing short-term mobility as a strategic mechanism and prospective policy tool to overcome productivity slowdowns and foster economic growth.     

Parents’ income and children’s school drop-out at 16 in England and Wales: evidence from the 1970 British Cohort Study

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ income on children’s drop-out from school at age 16 using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). Unlike previous papers using the same data set, we use a continuous measure of income derived from the grouped income variable available in the BCS70, we employ instrumental variable techniques to address the issue of endogeneity of family income and take account of the potential endogeneity of income response with respect to a child’s education by jointly modelling the school drop-out decision and response to the family income question. Our estimates show the exogeneity of response to the income question with a child’s education and are in line with the previous literature finding a statistically significant small negative effect of family income on school drop-out at 16. On the contrary, other non-pecuniary parental effects, such as parental education and social class, turn out to be both significant and of a sizeable magnitude. Early versions of this paper benefited from presentations at the University of Warwick, the ZEW Summer Workshop 2002 on Human Capital, the European Society for Population Economics 2002 Conference and the European Economic Association 2002 Conference and comments by Martin Andrews, Lorenzo Cappellari, Charlotte Lauer, Derek Leslie, Jeremy Smith, Mark Stewart, and two anonymous referees. The BCS70 data were kindly provided by, and used with permission of, the UK Data Archive (UKDA, University of Essex). Funding from the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Identifying the Quality of Work by Fuzzy Sets Theory: A Comparison Between Disabled and Non-disabled Workers

The paper assesses the quality of work of people with and without disabilities in Italy using the ISFOL PLUS (Participation, Labour, Unemployment, Survey 2010 Questionnaire, where the data refer to 2009. In particular, we develop a multidimensional indicator of quality of work within the fuzzy set theory. The results of the investigation show a different mechanism of determinants of quality of work for disabled and non-disabled people: while for these last ones seniority seem to highly contribute to the score of quality of work, institutional factors, like Law 68/99, whose aim is the regulation and promotion of the employment of persons with disabilities, appear to play a bigger role in the determination of the score for quality of work for disabled people. For medium and high levels of score of quality of work, education appears to play a similar role for disabled and non-disabled people, as the incidence of people with high quality jobs corresponds to people with a high level of education. However, for disabled people who are in low quality jobs the level of education appears to be irrelevant. Substantial differences emerge with respect to gender among disabled people, where women appear to be in higher quality of work scores than men; no substantial difference between genders emerges for non-disabled people.