!!! -LATEST - !!!

The LEXECON's project has been granted!!!

This issue contains an exposition of national research projects submitted to the Italian Ministry of University and research for funding. Some authors involved in those teams either as PI/s or as researchers are faculty members.

Even if under evaluation still, publishing our projects is a first step towards establishing international research networks aimed at promoting research on the projects’ subjects, irrespective of whether or not projects will be financed. The long-term goal is to build a large international networks’ network for cooperating in different fields, recovering and restoring the ancient spirit of University knowledge.

Accordingly, this special issue, open and permanently ongoing, is meant to call for expressions of interest in the network building and a call for contributions to discussion papers on projects themes.

!!! -LATEST - !!!

The LEXECON's project has been granted!!!

Annus horribilis has gone. Emergency has bent us to remote teaching; after two terms (Spring and Fall 2020) it has eventually broken us. Nonetheless, researches and studies have gone onward. Vaccine arrived. Is Annus mirabilis coming? We shall see that at the next issue. Meanwhile, starting from two studies related to both sides of the coin Covid-19, such as health and economics, we present a selection of papers pandemic-time-conceived. 

COVER STUDIES

CoViSTAT19 ( ANALISI DATI E PREVISIONI SU COVID-19 - Analisi statistiche sulla diffusione del virus in Italia, by  Andrea Consiglio, Vito Muggeo, Gianluca Sottile, Vincenzo G. Genova, Giorgio Bertolazzi, Mariano Porcu e Giovanni Boscaino) provides both data-sets and tools for monitoring and foreseeing pandemic scenarios, at national and regional leves.  

Growth uncertainty, European Central Bank intervention and the Italian debt by Andrea Consiglio, Stavros Zenios state the European Central Bank intervention provides a buffer against the uncertainty faced by European Union economies in the face of COVID-19. For the time being, this intervention has alleviated concern about Italy's debt, but without it, Italy is vulnerable to a debt crisis.

LAW

From the Alps to the Pyramids, nothing new under the sun. (Namely, from the 'Turin Foodora-case's tantamount-employee' to the 'Palermo Glovo-case's employee'.) New and old answers to new and old issues by Calogero Massimo Cammalleri faces the impact of work through digital platforms and AI robotics implementation on Employment Law and Social Security issues. It pushes for introducing a new 'uniform' and indirect financial system for protections for those who are not in a standard employment relationship.

MANAGEMENT

The Marsala Wine Consortium. A business economic analysis of its history. Evolution, decline and possible future scenarios by Sebastiano Torcivia deal with initiatives created the Marsala wine consortium. The paper traces the drastic reduction of the adherents to the consortium and contrasts between the primary producers, including the Florio company (today Duca di Salaparuta spa). 

The great waves of accounting thought: an attempt of comparison between English and Italian literature by Massimo Costa reports author's speech at the XV Biennale of the Italian Society for Accounting History on October, 23rd, 2020, as the Introductory intervention of the Congress. It concerned the discerning of several parallel waves between English and Italian Accounting literature, since the early beginnings and until the advent of the Globalization Era. 

ECONOMICS 

Growth uncertainty, European Central Bank intervention and the Italian debt is the paper by Andrea Consiglio and Stavros Zenios on European Central Bank Covis-19's intervention. They claim the BCE provides a buffer against the uncertainty faced by European Union economies in the face of COVID-19. However, this intervention has alleviated concern about Italy's debt for the time being, but without it, Italy is vulnerable to a debt crisis.

STATISTICS

A note on weighted third-order statistics for spatial point processes by Giada Adelfio, through a weighted version of the directional K-statistics, that is the T function, shows some theoretical results provided as a generalization of theorems introduced in Adelfio and Schoenberg (2009).

Estimating the number of changepoints in segmented regression models: comparative study and application by Nicoletta D'Angelo, Andrea Priulla, dealing with the selecting issue of the number of changepoints in segmented regression models, reviews selection criteria, namely information criteria and a hypothesis testing, and proposes a novel application in the context of students' careers in higher education. 

Calogero Massimo Cammalleri - Editor in Chief

We proudly announce that scholars from around the world very well received the dissemination of the d/Seas Working Papers through both SSRN and Unipa platforms. The launching of the inaugural issue has got such encouraging results. We summarise the top results as follow. Downloads are being from all the five continents. In the last six months, the department's papers have had about 12,000 unique visitors and over 2500 downloads have been done. The subscribers of the WPs are distributed widely and globally as best as each word is testified by the map above. Now, this Volume (n.2, 2018) offers a selection of papers both in economic and statistical fields. We propose both empirical and theoretical research that open up new scenarios and that, for this reason, all of them are fully entitled to recall the title New frontiers to which this volume is dedicated.

Inside the economics section – Biagio Bossone, Massimo Costa, Andrea Cuccia and Giuseppe Valenza (Accounting meets economics: towards an 'accounting view’ of money) study embodies the spirit of the Volume since it concerns the foundations of the “Accounting View” of money. The study that uses international accounting principles argues that state and central bank monies are not debt and that in fractional reserve regimes only a share of commercial bank money can be regarded as debt. The study determines how the seigniorage associated with the issuance of these monies should be accounted for in the financial statements of the issuing institutions, and examines what this implies for the correct understanding of money. The new view throws light into such issues as the true nature of central bank capital, commercial banks, and digital currencies. From there, authors derive and apply new measurements of seigniorage to the case of the UK (for which recent estimates exist). The results reveal that seigniorage, in particular, that extracted by commercial banks, is a quantitatively relevant phenomenon. The Andrea Consiglio, Massimo Attanasio, Stefano Fricano and Antonio Pecorella’s empirical study (A Maximum Demand Coverage Model for the Optimal Location of the AMAT’s Bike Sharing Stations) about the AMAT’s bike-sharing service discloses new horizons as well. Within a sustainable mobility project, it has involved the DSEAS and four secondary schools to the research project “GoToSchool”, a project whose main aim is to foster the use of the bike by the students in getting to the school. The project developed in two phases: the first phase was devoted to the estimate of the demand of bike-sharing service from the students; the second phase was committed to the study of an optimal facility allocation problem in order to maximise the demand of bike-sharing service is arising from students. The optimisation model can be easily customised to account for operational requirements from AMAT, such as, the maximum number of bike-sharing stations that can be installed according to the available budget, the inclusion or exclusion (“blacklist” or “whitelist”) of potential bike station places because of specific planning and organisational needs. Finally, the model provides a tool to evaluate some fundamental parameters such as the utility to reach school by bike, or the distances between the students home address and the places of the potential bike stations. Massimo Costa and Francesca Cimò (From Cash to Accrual Accounting: The seminal case of the Sicilian Regional Public Bodies) trace the progressive introduction of a complete accrual accounting by the Sicilian Regional public bodies – within the context of international and national public management changes – pursuing the ultimate goal to improve efficiency, accountability and transparency. After a close examination of the critical choices made by a Committee established for this purpose, the work investigates about the need to go beyond a “simple” accrual basis accounting system especially in a context where concepts like the inter-institutional horizon and public value are more and more relevant. Ancora, Gioacchino Fazio e Stefano Fricano (A Note on Economic Impact of EFF on Sicilian Firms Performance) investigate the measure 2.3 of the European Fisheries Fund in Sicily. Since it has claimed investments of fish firms in production capacity expansion and modernisation of fish processing, they analyse both whether or not such investments have been effective in supporting the competitiveness of these firms and whether they have influenced the economic sustainability of the regional seafood chain. They propose a counterfactual analysis for contributing to those assessments through comparison of business performance between funded and non-funded firms. Last but not least, Ieva Mikaliunaite and Andrea Cipollini (How important are GSI banks for the financial distress in the Eurozone? An analysis based on MIDAS VAR) first, extend the monthly Financial Stress Index (FSI) for Lithuania computed by ECB to a high-frequency (daily) horizon, and they also include the banking sector among its constituents (beyond bond, equity, foreign exchange markets). The empirical results suggest no evidence of Granger causality between the monthly FSI index and monthly industrial production growth. On the contrary, a Granger causality test applied to a VAR using mixed frequency data characterised by a significant mismatch in sampling frequencies of the series involved (i.e. daily vs monthly), suggests that the daily Lithuanian FSI has a predictive power for monthly Lithuanian IP growth for the full sample period (October 2001 – December 2016), but not vice versa. Full sample results are confirmed by rolling-window analysis. Inside the statistic section – Ornella Giambalvo and·Roberto Sichera (A Proposal to estimate the roaming–dog Total in an urban area through a PPSWOR spatial sampling with a sample size greater than two.) deal with risks dogs roaming in urban areas constitute for public order, hygiene and health. Authors face the issue of a lacking reliable statistical procedure aimed to measure such population available in literature as the problem to solve. The paper presents a simple, reproducible survey sampling procedure to estimate the number of roaming dogs in an urban area through the description of a real study carried out on a restricted area of the city of Palermo, in southern Italy. A sample of areas is drawn using a drawn–by–drawn spatial sampling with probabilities proportional to the size and without replacement (PPSWOR). As inclusion probabilities are not available in closed form, they are estimated by Monte Carlo approach, which is of simple implementation and permits design-based variance estimation even when first-order inclusion probabilities are unknown. Mariangela Sciandra, Antonio D’Ambrosio and Antonella Plaia (Projection Clustering Unfolding: a new algorithm for clustering individuals or items in a preference matrix) cope with the use of decision tree for clustering preference vectors. Starting from the fact that decision trees are useful and intuitive, but they are very unstable: small perturbations bring significant changes, authors propose the use of more stable procedures in order to clustering ranking data. In this work, a Projection Clustering Unfolding (PCU) algorithm for preference data will be proposed in order to extract useful information in a low-dimensional subspace by starting from a high but mostly empty dimensional space. Comparison between unfolding configurations and PCU solutions will be carried out through Procrustes analysis. In the next issues – We are scheduling two Volumes for 2019 — the third one with a selection of primary researches and seminars supported by and hosted by department respectively; one special issue will host a selection of commented rejected papers. We hope this recent initiative could trigger a hot, lively and exciting debate. Stay tuned!

The editor in chief
Calogero Massimo Cammalleri

I am glad to announce publishing of the first issue of d/SEAS Working Papers; - the new journal of Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche Aziendali e Statistiche dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo [d/SAEAS for short]. It gathers eight papers in all reseach fields of the d/SEAS: economics, law, business & managment, sociology, statistics. The aim of the SWPs is to share with a wide audience of academics, practi­tioners and policy makers original research in the above said research fields. I hope our Inaugural issue encourages the members of dSEAS, as well as all visitors, phD students, participants in conferences and workshops organized by the dSEAS to submit their papers to the SWPs and so being active part in the sharing of a free knowledge as it is in the spirit of academic community and that readers will find this new publication useful for their purposes. The d/SEAS Working Papers aims to be an active space for discussion as well: -for this reason it is possible, by registering, to interact through platform with the authors of the papers.

This Inaugural Issue publishes:

University student talent: the real driver for performance? by Giovanni Boscaino and Giada Adelfio about the university student performance, and its measurement. It investigates the role of a latent variable that can take into account the student motivation, aptitude, and abilities, here conveniently called talent and the results, they got through a random effect Quantile Regression on a new measure of Italian student performance, seems to highlight the main role of the talent).

Credit demand and supply shocks in Italy during the Great Recession, by Andrea Cipollini and Fabio Parla, uses Structural VAR analysis to disentangle credit demand and supply shocks and their effect on real economic activity in Italy during the 2008-2014 crisis period observinmg data at annual frequency for each of 103 Italian provinces. The empirical findings suggest a more important role of credit supply shocks in shaping the level of real economic activity. Furthermore, the results show that credit crunch hits the North of Italy less than the remaining macro-regions, especially the South-Italy.

Saving process within a zero waste strategy in Sicily: a system dynamics approach, by Andrea Cuccia, shows implementation of a zero waste strategy in a small municipality in Sicily. By building up a SD model it figure out how saving process connected to the decrease of amount of waste piled up in the landfill, has been boosting this virtuous cycle, which is bound to cope with the citizens claims about environmental care and lower tax burden level.

Some features of deindustrialisation in EU15 during the period 1999-2004: a multivariate analysis, by Maria Davì, examines the causes and the different modalities of deindustrialisation process closely with reference to 13 of the first EU15 countries. According to this essay the estimates indicate that the main factors responsible of the dynamics of deindustrialisation have been efficiency and the scale of production processes in various manufacturing activities.

Leisure, Social Capital and Life Turns in Deviant Youth, by Fabio Massimo Lo Verde, investigates the issues of the production of social capital in a specific area of everyday life such as leisure time and the different socio-cultural contexts in Italy. The conclusion it reaches offers three metaphors for understanding the trends of leisure time and sociability.

A recap on Linear Mixed Models and their hat-matrices, by Gianfranco Lovison and Mariangela Sciandra, has a twofold goal: provides a recap of Linear Mixed Models (LMMs  focusing on the derivation of theoretical results on estimation of LMMs and, on the other hand, it discusses various definitions that are available in the literature for the hat-matrix of Linear Mixed Models, showing their limitations and proving their equivalence.

Does regulatory regime matter for bank risktaking? A comparative analysis of US and Canada is a working paper presented by Sana Mohsni and Isaac Otchere at a seminar of ours Department. Our guest authors compare banking structure in the US e in Canada in the the wake of the worst financial crisis in 2008.Their analysis shows that entry restrictions, which create concentrated banking structure, restrictions relating to capital, liquidity and activities, and strong supervisory power and discipline positively related to the z-score, suggesting that these factors constrain excessive risk taking by Canadian banks.

Fabrizio Piraino’s Ideas for a new reading of the law regulation of internet service providers addresses the issue of the so called internet service provider's liability under artt. 12-14 dir. 00/31, with specific regard to the violations of copyright. The study aims at demonstrating that European Law on ISP is not a law on tort, but regulates a sphere of lawful action in favor of internet service providers. The analysis of the Court of Justice's case-law reveals that the primary remedy against offenses committed on the internet is an injunction, while damages are only a secondary relief. This confirms the hypothesis that artt. 12-14 dir. 00/31 draw the perimeter of the legitimate activity of the internet service provider. The essay ends with a re-interpretation of the Italian provisions set forth at artt. 14-16 d.l gs. 70/2003 in order to align them, with the European directive, especially with regard to the hosting performance rules.

The editor in chief
Calogero Massimo Cammalleri