Regional Institutional Quality Research Articles

Regional government institutions and the capacity for women to reconcile career and motherhood

Abstract Declining fertility and the persistent underrepresentation of women in the labour market are key concerns of our time. The fact that they overlap is not fortuitous. Traditionally, women everywhere have faced a conflict in balancing their career ambitions with family responsibilities. Yet, the pressures arising from this conflict vary enormously from one place to another. Existing research has tended to overlook the geographical features of this dilemma, which could result in an inadequate understanding of the issue and lead to ineffective policy responses. This article examines how variations in the quality of regional institutions affect women’s capacity to reconcile career and motherhood and, consequently, gender equality within Europe. Using panel data from 216 regions across 18 European countries, we uncover a positive effect of regional institutional quality on fertility rates, taking into account variations in female employment. Moreover, we show that European regions with better government quality provide a more reliable environment for managing the career/motherhood dilemma often faced by women. In contrast, women living in regions with weaker government institutions are more constrained in both their career and childbearing options.

The Dynamic Role of Subnational Regions in Firm Performance

AbstractThis study investigates dynamics of subnational regions in determining firm performance over time and by ownership type. We explain theoretically how subnational regions affect firm performance over time in the context of path dependence and the institution‐based view and test these predictions using annual data of manufacturing firms in China from 2000 to 2014 – before and after a major negative institutional shock (2008 financial crisis). Consistent with path dependence, regional institutional quality diverges across regions before 2008, a pattern that is disrupted post‐2008. Firm performance is increasing in institutional quality so that location effects are increasingly important before the financial crisis but less so post‐crisis. These effects are greater for private‐ than state‐owned enterprises consistent with differences in organizational objectives under the institution‐based view.

“Natural” disasters and regional governance: Evidence from European NUTS-3 regions

“Natural” disasters" have negative consequences for the affected areas, including significant economic impacts. Using a sample of European NUTS-3 regions over the period 2003–17, this paper examines the impact of disasters on regional economic growth and the influence of the quality of regional governance on post-disaster economic recovery. We match disaster data from the EM-DAT database, EUROSTAT, US Geological Surveys and Global Archive of Large Floods. We find that the occurrence of a “natural” disaster leads to an annual decline in regional growth of about 0.28 percentage points. Furthermore, we find that both the impact on the economy and the duration of recovery are influenced by the quality of regional institutions.

How does the digital transformation of corporates affect green technology innovation? An empirical study from the perspective of asymmetric effects and structural breakpoints

With the continuous advancement of the digital economy and green development strategies, exploring the impact of digital transformation on corporate green technology innovation becomes an importantly urgent issue. Based on the perspectives of asymmetric effects and structural breakpoints, this paper empirically analyses the effect of digital transformation on green technology innovation, as well as its heterogeneity and non-linear characteristics, using fixed effect models and panel threshold model with a sample of Chinese A-share-listed corporates from 2011 to 2021. The findings suggest that digital transformation of corporates can significantly promotes green technology innovation, which remains valid after a series of endogenous and robustness tests. Heterogeneous regression results shows that digital transformation exhibits an asymmetric impact on green technology innovation, with greater incentive effect for state-owned corporates, manufacturing corporates, and corporates located in areas with stricter environmental regulations. Additionally, threshold effect analyses prove that a positive non-linear relationship between digital transformation and green technology innovation, when corporate human capital, industry competition and regional institutional quality exceeded their respective structural breakpoints, the marginal contribution of digital transformation is further strengthened. This research provides clearer policy insights for corporates to promote cleaner production and low carbon development through digitization.

Regional institutional quality and territorial equity in LTC provision

We show how regional governments affect the appropriate – in terms of territorial equity – assignment of a national LTC benefit. We analyse the case of Italy, featuring a three-layers setting, where eligibility criteria are defined by the central government (which bears the fiscal cost of transfers), but the assignment decision is taken by regional medical commissions, while applications are activated by individual potential beneficiaries. Combining administrative and survey data, and accounting for regional variation in eligibility prevalence, we document large territorial disparities in need-adjusted benefit assignment. We investigate the determinants of such disparities both in terms of individuals’ differential propensity to claim, and of regional discretionary behaviour, as shaped by the underlying quality of regional institutions. While several data limitations recommend caution, the empirical results suggest – in line with our conceptual framework – that regional discretion plays a role in LTC provision: in more detail, lower regional institutional quality appears related to more opportunistic benefit adjudication decisions.

Quality of institutions and employment dynamics of social enterprises: Evidence from Italian regions

This paper empirically investigates the effect of the quality of regional institutions on social enterprises’ employment growth. Using an original panel dataset of social enterprises during 2011–2020, FE and GMM estimates provide three findings. First, higher institutional quality at the regional level positively affects firms’ employment. Second, the effect is heterogenous and varies across firms’ size. Third, corruption in the provision of public services significantly inhibits the “speed” of employment growth for Micro and SMEs.

Value chain, regional institutions and firm growth in Europe

AbstractWe analyse whether and to what extent the quality of regional institutions has a differential effect on firms’ growth driven by heterogeneity in firm value chain positioning. We analyse turnover growth during the period 2010–2013 for a sample of manufacturing firms located in four European countries—France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We distinguish final firms serving end markets from suppliers serving other firms. Our instrumental variable estimates point to high-quality regional institutions enhancing the growth performance of only locally embedded suppliers with operations confined to the own regional market—that is, the ‘weakest’ node of the value chain.

Testing conditional multivariate rank correlations: the effect of institutional quality on factors influencing competitiveness

Joint distribution between two or more variables could be influenced by the outcome of a conditioning variable. In this paper, we propose a flexible Wald-type statistic to test for such influence. The test is based on a conditioned multivariate Kendall’s tau nonparametric estimator. The asymptotic properties of the test statistic are established under different null hypotheses to be tested for, such as conditional independence or testing for constant conditional dependence. Two simulation studies are presented: The first shows that the estimator proposed and the bandwidth selection procedure perform well. The second presents different bivariate and multivariate models to check the size and power of the test and runs comparisons with previous proposals when appropriate. The results support the contention that the test is accurate even in complex situations and that its computational cost is low. As an empirical application, we study the dependence between some pillars of European Regional Competitiveness when conditioned on the quality of regional institutions. We find interesting results, such as weaker links between innovation and higher education in regions with lower institutional quality.

Regional institutional quality and firm-level innovation: a case of selected south asian economies

Regional institutional quality and firm-level innovation: a case of selected south asian economies

The role of regional formal institutions in China's OFDI location choice and firm performance - The moderation roles of international experience and foreign capital utilization

Based on the micro data of Chinese enterprises, this paper examines the effects of regional formal institutional environment in China on the location choice and firm performance of Chinese OFDI, and discusses the roles played by international experience and the foreign capital usage. The results show that regional formal institutional environment of China significantly and positively affects the location choice and performance of Chinese OFDI. Moreover, different regional formal institutions have varied effects. In particular, institutional factors represented by the ‘government and market relationship’, ‘product market’ and ‘factor market’ development play the key role. It is also found that actual FDI utilization and firms’ international experience play positive and significant moderation roles in the institutional effect on China's OFDI, but such moderation effects are constrained to ‘intermediary organizations and legal environment’ as the institutional factor only. Therefore, the policy of improving regional institutional quality can have a positive effect on OFDI and corporate performance.

On the impact of knowledge and institutional spillovers on RIS efficiency. Evidence from Italian regional level

AbstractUsing regional Italian data over the 2004–2011 period, we embed, within the framework of a double‐bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), both knowledge and institutional spillovers to appraise how the latter affect Regional Innovation System (RIS) efficiency and further investigate how the quality of institutions interacts with RIS efficiency. Our evidence suggests that both knowledge and institutional spillovers enhance RIS efficiency. We find evidence of spillovers of control of corruption, government effectiveness, voice and accountability and regulatory quality, though these results crucially depend on the set of inputs employed. Once the two types of spillovers enter jointly, rather than separately, our specifications, the evidence indicates that both these spillovers positively affect RIS efficiency and their impact is quantitatively comparable. There is also some evidence of a positive effect of regional institutional quality on RIS efficiency, although the result is mediated by increased government effectiveness. In terms of policy implications, the evidence reported in this paper suggests that measures aimed at favouring cooperation among firms, that facilitate an easier imitation strategy and that improve governance are highly recommendable.

Family firms in European regions: the role of regional institutions

ABSTRACT Our study investigates whether the quality of regional institutions influences firms’ likelihood of being a family firm. We explore our conjecture using the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset, which provides comparable cross-country data on manufacturing firms in seven European countries. We use a multilevel framework to analyse how firm- and regional-level variables influence firms’ likelihood of being a family firm. We find evidence that location matters in explaining firms’ probability of being a family firm but that differences between countries are more relevant than are differences between regions. Our results show that the lower the quality of regional institutions, the higher the likelihood of a firm being a family firm. Our results are robust to alternative regional-level control variables and persist after several robustness checks.

Credit constraints in European SMEs: does regional institutional quality matter?

ABSTRACT We analyse the investment-to-cash flow relationship in Europe using a sample of manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) over the period 2009–2016. We investigate the effect of regional institutional quality on the investment-to-cash flow sensitivity, finding that, although credit constraints remain a serious problem for European SMEs, high-quality regional institutions contribute to mitigate the dependency on internally-generated resources to finance new investments. Improvements in local institutional quality can therefore facilitate SMEs’ access to credit – e.g. through inter-firm trade credit relationships –, but are insufficient to overcome the credit restrictions faced by European SMEs.

Relationship between innovation, regional institutions and firm performance: Micro-evidence from Africa

The main aim of this paper is to examine empirically the extent to which firm-specific action, innovation, and an external factor, the quality of regional institution, affect firms’ productivity. To this end, a firm-level dataset from 15 African countries was used and the three-step CDM approach was employed to estimate the relationship. The empirical results of the study highlight that firms that invest in R&D are more innovative and innovative firms are more productive, indicating the importance of innovation for firms’ productivity. In addition, regional institutional quality has a significant positive effect on productivity, particularly for firms at low productivity distribution. Therefore, improving the quality of regional institutions, in addition to promoting R&D and innovation, is essential to enhance the productive capacity of firms in Africa. The present study contributes to the existing literature by providing new empirical evidence on the role of regional/local institutions on firm productivity for a region, Africa, which needs productivity enhancement the most. It is also recommended that further studies, similar to this one, should be carried out in order to better understand the topic in the context of African firms.

Credit constraints, labor productivity, and the role of regional institutions: Evidence from manufacturing firms in Europe

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between credit constraints—proxied by the investment‐to‐cash flow sensitivity—and firm‐level economic performance— defined in terms of labor productivity—during the period 2009–2016, using a sample of 22,380 manufacturing firms from 11 European countries. It also assesses how regional institutional quality affects productivity at the level of the firm both directly and indirectly. The empirical results highlight that credit rationing is rife and represents a serious barrier for improvements in firm‐level productivity and that this effect is far greater for micro and small than for larger firms. Moreover, high‐quality regional institutions foster productivity and help mitigate the negative credit constraints–labor productivity relationship that limits the economic performance of European firms. Dealing with the European productivity conundrum thus requires greater attention to existing credit constraints for micro and small firms, although in many areas of Europe access to credit will become more effective if institutional quality is improved.

Technology Import and China's Innovation Capability: Does Institutional Quality Matter?

With the rapid growth of China's economy, technology import plays a crucial role in enhancing regional innovation capability. Based on inter-provincial panel data from 2007 to 2016, this paper uses three benchmark linear regression models of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Difference-Generalized Method of Moments (DIFF-GMM), and System-Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) to explore the improvement of China's regional innovation capability by technology import. Then, the regional institutional quality level is measured from the three dimensions of politics, economy, and law, and the two-step difference GMM threshold panel model is used to analyze the effect of technology import on regional innovation capability under different institutional quality conditions. The results show that: (1) In the benchmark linear regression model, technology import has a significant role in promoting regional innovation capability. (2) With the rise of regional corruption, the quality of political institution declines, and the promotion effect of technology import on regional innovation ability is weakened. (3) The improvement of the marketization level and intellectual property protection level strengthen the role of technology introduction in promoting regional innovation capability. On the contrary, in regions with low economic and legal institutional quality, technology import has no significant impact on regional innovation capability.

The impact of regional institutional quality on firm innovation: evidence from Africa

ABSTRACT The main aim of this study is to empirically examine the role of regional institutional quality, and compare the relative importance of three different institutional arrangements, namely regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption, on propensity of firm innovation in African countries. To this end, we used the most recent World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) of firms from 19 African countries. Our empirical investigation using multilevel logistic regression has drawn three important conclusions. First, there is no significant relationship between firm-specific factors, such as age, ownership, and exporting, and firm innovation. Nonetheless, firms’ propensity to innovate is significantly determined by the size of the firm, R&D expenditures, on-the-job training (OJT), and capability of managers/owners to adopt new technologies. Second, the innovation performance of firms is significantly affected by regional institutional quality. Third, among different regional institutional arrangements, reducing corruption and maintaining rule of law appeared to matter the most for firm innovation.

Network utilities performance and institutional quality: Evidence from the Italian electricity sector

It is generally accepted that institutions are important for economic development. However, whether the performance of regulated utilities within a country is affected by the quality of institutions is yet to be investigated thoroughly. We analyse how the quality of regional institutions impact performance of Italian electricity distribution utilities. We use a stochastic frontier analysis approach to estimate cost functions and examine the performance of 107 electricity distribution utilities from 2011 to 2015. This unique dataset was constructed with the help of the Italian Regulator for Energy, Networks, and Environment. In addition, we use a recent dataset on regional institutional quality in Italy. We present evidence that utilities in regions with better responsiveness towards citizens, control of corruption, and rule of law, tend to be more cost efficient. The results suggest that national regulators should take regional institutional diversity into account in incentive regulation and efficiency benchmarking of utilities.

Institutional quality and firms’ productivity in European regions

ABSTRACT The relationship between regional institutional quality and firms’ productivity in the period 2010–14 is investigated by regressing a measure of total factor productivity for European manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises on a regional level index of institutional quality and its components, the rule of law and government effectiveness. Strong evidence is found that better local institutions help small and medium-sized enterprises become more productive. In addition, the impact of institutions interplays with some firm characteristics, such as firms’ size, age, human capital and productivity level, as well as firms’ operating sector. These findings have important implications for the definition of suitable strategies to foster economic growth in the European regions.

Patterns and determinants of the horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade of regions: panel analysis for Spain & Poland

ABSTRACTMost of the empirical studies in the literature on intra-industry trade are conducted at the country level. Countries, however, differ in terms of granularity and internal heterogeneity. In the present study we empirically identify the determinants of the overall IIT as well as its horizontal and vertical components in the trade of Spanish and Polish NUTS-2 regions with all existing trade partners over the period 2005–2014. In order to obtain unbiased results, we utilize a semi-mixed effect model, estimated with the PPML method. We estimate the models jointly for all Spanish and Polish regions and then disjointly in a comparative manner – in order to identify incongruities of reaction to the various factors investigated. These include both traditional factors and a number of unorthodox factors such as regional path dependence, quality of regional institutions, the core or peripheral status of the reporting region.