Suchergebnisse

This work investigates the Italian judicial system and discusses the designing of a policy reform to boost the efficiency of courts, considering the human resources available as well as the expenditure generated by the process to deliver justice. The authors present the benchmarks and shed light on how policy makers embarking on such a process of reform may be misled by inappropriate model definition. In detail, the authors propose a comparative analysis of technical efficiency (TE) scores computed using data envelopment analysis, adopting the same output (number of settled cases) and two alternative sets of inputs (judicial expenditure and human resources). According to the results, without considering the information extracted from the two complementary benchmark analyses, policy makers might be misled in the reform process. Regarding the elements that affect the performance of courts, it may be possible to improve the efficiency of judicial districts by working on judicial procedures. Hence, these are the domains where interventions by policy makers may prove successful. As for policy implications, the models and benchmarks presented here could be used to devise a reform of the judicial system aimed at enhancing its TE, while also keeping public expenditure under control.

Purpose
The recent literature on corporate governance and gender diversity underlines that those differences may go beyond a pure or direct effect on firms' performance and in this vein, this study aims to investigate whether the presence of women in leading positions can affect the credit rating indicators.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors focus on Italian manufacturing firms, as well as small and medium firms (SMEs), that are often under-represented in previous studies, despite their importance in many economies. The authors extract data on directors and top managers as well as rating classes and credit score indicators, and using a fixed-effects model, the authors analyze the relationship between credit risk mitigation and the inclusion of women among top managers, consistently with the rising empirical literature focused on risk perceptions.


Findings
The authors find a significant negative relationship between female participation in top management and credit risk, with a greater impact associated with smaller firms, where the presence of a female top manager might make the difference. The results are robust to different model specifications and estimation strategies, and the authors find different magnitudes of the effects also according to the geographical location of the firm.


Research limitations/implications
Because of the chosen sample of manufacturing firms, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to expand the study and test the approach elsewhere.


Originality/value
The authors add new and more robust empirical evidence of a negative relationship between female participation in the top management and credit risk by focusing on the entire population of Italian nonlisted manufacturing firms.