Search results

This paper aims to present a case study outlining the importance of getting a grip on the regulatory realities of cross-border mergers.

The paper examines the help that Ius Laboris, a specialist international human resources (HR) law firm alliance, was able to give in the merger of a major multinational fashion company based in Italy and a French firm.

The paper charts the way in which the law firm’s experts, with their detailed local knowledge, were able to help in ensuring that the merger went ahead smoothly.

The paper reveals that all the processes carried out across the world were under the control of a restricted number of people in Italy, near the headquarters of the company. Local branches, often with no administrative back-up, were not required to search for local consultants and lawyers.

The paper highlights some of the legal complications of cross-border mergers and ways in which to overcome them.

Reveals how important it is for HR to be aware of the cross-border vision and to have ready access to legal and regulatory expertise that can be relied upon whenever required.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether offshoring strategies are able to substantially enhance firms’ international competitiveness in terms of productivity, innovativeness and skill composition for a panel of Italian manufacturing firms.

A set of hypotheses derived from the extant literature is tested on data from balance sheets and qualitative surveys of about 4,000 Italian firms. The methodology used is a propensity score matching estimator and difference in differences method that allowed the authors to detect the causal effect of the offshoring status of the firms on some performance measures.

Results demonstrate that offshoring increases the propensity to innovate and the skill ratio of workers but does not show a significant association with productivity growth. The estimates are robust in all the specifications.

The results are applicable to Italian firms. The magnitude and timing of the effects may vary across firms and countries.

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on offshoring by exploring its impact on a variety of firms’ performance measures by using matching techniques that allow us to investigate more in depth the causality link of the relationship and to control for the self-selection effect (more productive firms self-select to offshore).