Papers by Francesco Biancalani
Sorting of Heterogeneous Firms and the North-South Divide in Italy
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
In this paper, we investigate the process of entry and exit of Italian manufacturing firms in rel... more In this paper, we investigate the process of entry and exit of Italian manufacturing firms in relationship with characteristics of Italian provinces, at the NUTS 3-digit, with a focus on the productivity distributions of incumbent firms. We find a higher churning of firms, both entry and exit, in bigger and more productive provinces. After entry, firms show a higher productivity premium where already more productive firms are. Our findings are consistent with recent theories predicting an endogenous sorting of heterogeneous firms over space. In provinces where average productivity is lower, firm-level distributions are also more dispersed, probably due to a looser selection process at the local level. When we consider the historical geographic divide of the country, we estimate less than half the probability that a new firm is born in the South, where a representative firm is already about 28% less productive than in the North of the country. Results are robust to different industrial specialization patterns. Our findings point to a process of self-reinforcing divergence in productivity that exacerbates initial geographical disparities.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
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Hierarchical Clustering and Matrix Completion for the Reconstruction of World Input-Output Tables
World Input-Output (I/O) matrices provide the networks of within- and cross-country economic rela... more World Input-Output (I/O) matrices provide the networks of within- and cross-country economic relations. In the context of I/O analysis, the methodology adopted by national statistical offices in data collection raises the issue of obtaining reliable data in a timely fashion and it makes the reconstruction of (part of) the I/O matrices of particular interest. In this work, we propose a method combining hierarchical clustering and Matrix Completion (MC) with a LASSO-like nuclear norm penalty, to impute missing entries of a partially unknown I/O matrix. Through simulations based on synthetic matrices we study the effectiveness of the proposed method to predict missing values from both previous years data and current data related to countries similar to the one for which current data are obscured. To show the usefulness of our method, an application based on World Input-Output Database (WIOD) tables - which are an example of industry-by-industry I/O tables - is provided. Strong similarities in structure between WIOD and other I/O tables are also found, which make the proposed approach easily generalizable to them.
Price-volume agreements: a one principal/two agents model
European Journal of Operational Research
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Papers by Francesco Biancalani