Suchergebnisse

Purpose
This paper aims to appraise the effectiveness of gender quotas in breaking the glass ceiling for women on boards (WoBs) in companies that are legally obliged to comply with quotas (listed companies and state-owned companies, LP) and in those that are not (unlisted companies and nonstate-owned companies, NLNP). Furthermore, it investigates the glass cliff phenomenon, according to which women are more likely to be appointed to apical positions in underperforming companies.


Design/methodology/approach
A balanced panel data of the top 116 Italian companies by total assets, which are present in both 2010 and 2017, is used for estimating ANOVA tests across sectors and fixed-effects panel regression models.


Findings
WoBs significantly increased in both the LP and the NLNP companies, and this increase was greater in the financial sector. Furthermore, the relationship between the percentage of WoBs and firm performance is not linear but depends on the financial corporate health. Specifically, the situation in which a woman ascends to a leadership position in challenging circumstances where the risk of failure is high (glass cliff phenomenon) is only present in companies with the lowest performance in the sample, in other words, when negative values of Roe and negative or zero values of Roa occur together.


Practical implications
These findings have relevant policy implications that encourage the adoption of gender quotas even in specific top positions, such as CEO or president, as this could lead to a "double spillover effect" both vertically, that is, in other job positions, and horizontally, toward other companies not targeted by quotas. Practical interventions to support women in glass cliff positions, on the other hand, relate to the extent of supervisor mentoring and support to prevent women from leaving director roles and strengthen their chances for career advancement.


Originality/value
The authors explore the ability of gender quotas to break through the glass ceiling in companies that are not legally obliged to do so, and to the best of the authors' knowledge, for the first time, the glass cliff phenomenon in the Italian context.

Different authors have argued the importance of central banker's secrecy over alternative targets of monetary policy. One of the argument is based on the welfare results in a well known signalling game of monetary policy by Vickers (1986). This work aims to show how this argument crucially depends on the cost of separation and the specification of the prior beliefs held by private agents about the preferences of central banker. This is performed by solving a model similar to that solved by Vickers (1986) under a different assumption (a continuum of types) about the support of the distribution of prior beliefs. Welfare analysis shows that the result underlying the argument by Persson and Tabellini (1990) about the convenience of Central Banker's secrecy is upturned when the priors are skewed towards high inflation and alternative devices like credible pegging of a nominal variable, delegation and (negotiated) wage controls may be welfare enhancing. Furthermore, we show that if an appointed central banker has to incurr signalling costs a Rogoff (1985) type result can not be obtained and secrecy may be a bad substitute for commitment.

Different authors have argued the importance of central banker's secrecy over alternative targets of monetary policy. One of the argument is based on the welfare results in a well known signalling game of monetary policy by Vickers (1986). This work aims to show how this argument crucially depends on the cost of separation and the specification of the prior beliefs held by private agents about the preferences of central banker. This is performed by solving a model similar to that solved by Vickers (1986) under a different assumption (a continuum of types) about the support of the distribution of prior beliefs. Welfare analysis shows that the result underlying the argument by Persson and Tabellini (1990) about the convenience of Central Banker's secrecy is upturned when the priors are skewed towards high inflation and alternative devices like credible pegging of a nominal variable, delegation and (negotiated) wage controls may be welfare enhancing. Furthermore, we show that if an appointed central banker has to incurr signalling costs a Rogoff (1985) type result can not be obtained and secrecy may be a bad substitute for commitment.

In questo lavoro si utilizza analisi di sopravvivenza per stimare la durata della disoccupazione attraverso un modello parametrico di azzardo proporzionale con ipotesi di distribuzione Weibull. Le variabili considerate nell' analisi riguardano le caratteristiche personali e della storia lavorativa passata degli individui iscritti alle liste di disoccupazione. I dati sono relativi agli iscritti all' Ufficio di Collocamento della provincia di Modena nell' Aprile 1991.1 risultati non mostrano l'esistenza di una significativa dipendenza dalla durata, qualora si tenga conto della eterogeneità tra i lavoratori. Cio significa che non vi è dipendenza, nè positiva nè negativa, della probabilità di uscita dalla disoccupazione dal tempo trascorso nella stato di disoccupato.