Abstract This paper explores the question how firms manage PMI when new joint projects must be completed long before the PMI process is completed and identifies integration mechanisms and organizational solutions at work when firms have to develop new products while still merging their relative sets of innovation competences and knowledge. By employing a processual view and longitudinal analysis, our results show how Fiat and Chrysler, two major automotive manufacturer, carried out the integration of their highly complex and tacit knowledge during their first co-development project. The project represented the real locus of technological and knowledge integration between the two firms and the organizational and integration solutions identified contribute to the NPD literature by showing how, at the same time, firms’ can support both new projects execution and integration efforts after M&As. JEL classification: O32 Keywords: R&D integration, NPD organization, merger and acquisitions The paper is co-authored with Markus C. Becker (University of Southern Denmark) and Francesco Zirpoli (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice)

The aim of this article is to assess whether the track attended in upper secondary education affects student achievement in Italy, by disentangling the genuine effects of track choices from selection biases relating to the different characteristics of students enrolled in different tracks. We contribute to the literature by relying on a more detailed measure of tracking, by focusing on between-school tracking and exploring whether track effects vary systematically by student social background, a largely overlooked issue in previous research. We adopt a counterfactual approach and rely on population panel data on a recent cohort of students assessed in 5th, 8th and 10th grade. We rely on a difference-in-difference strategy integrated with marginal mean weighting with stratification and inverse probability weighting, which are used respectively to better control for selection into tracks and account for missing data. First, we document strong social selection into tracks, along selection based on previous scholastic achievement. Second, we find that track effects are substantial on both reading and mathematics performance, albeit slightly larger in the latter subject. Beyond the anticipated advantage of the academic track over vocational education, we also find differential effects of attending different curricula within these tracks. Third, the benefits of attending the academic tracks appear to be rather homogeneous across students from different social backgrounds. Keywords: tracking; inequality; achievement; causal effect; social background

Reviving European countries and economies overwhelmed by the Coronavirus crisis. This is the purpose of the policies implemented by the European Union, be it the Recovery Fund, the Sure program to support employment and the actions of the European Central Bank. How countries translate these commitments into National Recovery and Resilience Plans will determine how they will come out of the crisis and influence the future process of European integration.

This article focuses on the socio-economic integration of ethnic minorities in Italy, combining the literature on migration with research on social stratification. We analyse the ethnic penalty on occupational attainment and career mobility, integrating the origin-education-destination theoretical framework with the migration status. Since ethnic penalty is an ‘umbrella concept’, we also quantify the extent to which it is mediated by differences in education and social origin. Furthermore, adopting a diachronic view of immigrants’ class attainment, we verify whether the post-migration downgrading is followed by a recovery during the career, considering also mobility within the working class (standard and non-standard). Our analyses are based on the Multipurpose Survey on Households and Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens. The results show that migrants are penalized in the Italian labour market, remaining largely ‘trapped’ in the working class. This inclusion at the bottom of the class structure reduces their heterogeneity by education and by social origin. Moreover, their penalty increases during the career, except when they move from the non-standard to the standard working class. Finally, we find that the ‘unexplained’ component of ethnic penalty, net of education and social origin, is substantial and increases from the first to the current job.

If individuals tend to behave like their peers, is it because of conformity, that is, the preference of people to align behavior with the behavior of their peers; homophily, that is, the tendency of people to bond with similar others; or both? We address this question in the context of an ethical dilemma. Using a peer effect model allowing for homophily, we designed a real-effort laboratory experiment in which individuals could misreport their performance to earn more. Our results reveal a preference for conformity and for homophily in the selection of peers, but only among participants who were cheating in isolation. The size of peer effects is similar when identical peers were randomly assigned and when they were selected by individuals. We thus jointly reject the presence of a self-selection bias in the peer effect estimates and of a link strength effect.

New advancements in automated web scraping technologies (i.e. the automated retrieval and storage of textual information from the internet) allow to collect and leverage the richness of the information contained in online job postings and use it to analyse trends in labour market dynamics and skill demands with unprecedented granularity and timeliness. The presentation will discuss the OECD approach to the analysis of the skill information contained in millions of online vacancies and the various applications of big-data analytics for labour market intelligence during the COVID-19 crisis. The presentation will also discuss the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to derive a word’s meaning from the context and show how to empirically apply those algorithms to infer the ‘relevance’ of each skill-keyword for a wide range of occupations. Based on this, the presentation will discuss approaches to determine occupational similarity based on skill requirements and ways to leverage this information to suggest feasible retraining pathways to workers displaced during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally the discussion will provide insights on how to use NLP approaches to determine the degree of ‘transversality’ of skills across jobs and the labour market returns (wage and employment dynamics) that are associated to those.

Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy during the past decades. We exam-ine the political effects of these adjustments in Western countries since the early 1990susing both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expectthat austerity increases populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters,who are hit most by austerity. Following the political economy literature, we identifyeconomically vulnerable regions, looking at the share of low-skilled workers and shareof manufacturing production. The results from a difference-in-differences analysis showthat austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions,but austerity has little effect on voting in economically less vulnerable regions. Thesefindings are confirmed by the analysis at the individual level. Our results suggestthat the success of populist parties across Europe critically hinges on the governmentsfailure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins ofpopulism, therefore, are not purely external, but the populist backlash is triggered byinternal factors, notably public policies.Keywords: fiscal policy, globalization, automation, political backlash, elections, West-ern Europe.Word count: 9,462. The paper is co-authored with Thomas Sattler, University of Geneva,

A growing effort among social scientists assesses the social consequences and costs of law enforcement activity for the health and education of minorities. This talk presents four key research findings from my ongoing work on this topic: First, disparities in exposure to Stop-Question-and-Frisk (SQF) are vast. Second, racial bias in policing explains some of these disparities in exposure. Third, SQF (maybe) reduced crime. Finally, SQF has negative consequences for the education and health of minority youth. I conclude by outlining key challenges for future research on the social consequences and costs of law enforcement activity.

Why does academia collectively produce so many papers? Why are so many papers so boring to read, repetitive, and unoriginal? Why are academics spending so much time of their life and work to write all these papers, with up to 95% chance to be rejected by (top-tier) journals? This piece aims to understand how the academic system has developed to its current state, what the meaning is of the enormous production of academic papers. It does so via using the concept of ‘Reproduction of Form’, which was originally coined by anthropologist Yurchak, to understand the perfect reproduction of discourse in Post-Stalin Soviet Union. This concept allows not only to understand why academic papers are formulated in such uniform ways, but also why underpinning ideologies in management research are appearing, yet hardly discussed. This piece finishes with a discussion of proposed alternatives, and pleas for variation of form and practice, to advocate for more pluralism in the ways we conduct our research and write about it.