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The fundamental question of whether offshoring is value enhancing and, more specifically, whether Italian manufacturing firms that undertake offshoring benefit from higher productivity and profitability is explored. Using data from the tenth wave of the ' Survey on Manufacturing Firms' conducted by Unicredit- Capitalia, it was found that, compared with domestic firms, firms relocating activities to a foreign country have different characteristics, and 'better' firms might self-select into offshoring decision. To disentangle the effect of offshoring on firms' performances from the effect of firm characteristics, several variants of propensity score matching are used. A mild and insignificant positive effect of offshoring on profitability was found and also evidence of a statistically significant positive effect of offshoring on productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of crime is often considered as one of the most important social variables to be negatively associated with economic development. As is well known, Italy exhibits an economic divide between its central-northern and southern regions. This paper tries to ascertain whether there is also a divide in the diffusion of crime. To this purpose, Italian provinces are classified into groups by using a new methodology that combines cluster analysis with time series cross-section data. The statistical searches for groups are carried out by using an unbalanced time series cross-section data-set made up of yearly observations. The results of the analysis show that crime is not inextricably tied to certain geographical locations, and not others, as is usually believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]