Enrico E. Bertacchini, Chiara Dalle Nogare (p), Raffaele Scuderi

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

We exploit the rich information provided by the 2015 Italian museum census to investigate the factors associated to a greater probability for a museum to address immigrant audiences, with a special focus on their size and dynamics and the relevance of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the local context of reference. We proxy the latter with the municipal vote shares for the parties with an anti-immigrant agenda in the 2013 national elections. While our evidence on the role of immigrant demography is not robust, Lega Nord vote share is found to have a significantly negative, sizable coefficient. We control for a number of context variables and some specific museum characteristics, some of which (size, age, type of collection) turn out to be positively associated to a museum’s commitment to immigrant integration. Our analysis is one of the first considering the consequences, in terms of implemented spending policies, of the recent surge of populist right-wing sentiments and parties in Europe. We conducted it avoiding adopting the traditional political economy empirical framework where quantitative aggregate fiscal spending indicators are on the left hand side of the model and the left-right dimension of the ruling party is on the right hand side. In fact, in our view, the adoption of such an approach may lead to an underestimation of the impact for two distinct reasons. One is the use of quantitative aggregate policy indicators, such as spending in general or spending for a certain budget item: in fact, policy is not just on how much money you spend, but also or on what you spend it within each policy domain. The other reason, highlighted by Schumacher and van Kersbergen (2016), is that there may be an impact irrespective of the fact that anti-immigrant parties are on power. In fact, the surge of populism activates a self-censorship attitude towards their preferred political choices in the parties confronting them, a standard Downsian effect.

Martin Andersson (p), Johan Eklund , Alexandra Tsvetkova

Chiara Dalle Nogare

Access to finance is essential for firms in order to scale-up their businesses and to develop their productivity. It is well established that SMEs often face more obstacles than larger firms when it comes to access to external finance, and this is often put forth as an important barrier for the growth and productivity of SMEs. Recent literature also points to that the location of SMEs also influence their access finance, though robust empirical evidence is limited. This paper presents an empirical analysis of financial constraints of SMEs across the urban-rural hierarchy in Sweden. We use a simple model of investment behavior which allows us to examine if the sensitivity of investments to internal cash flow in Swedish SMEs is influenced by their location. To this end we use firm level data covering all Swedish firms over 1997-2012. We find that the investment–cash flow sensitivity is lower in large cities and in city centers. Firms located outside of large cities and who are independent, i.e. not part of a corporate group, have highest cash flow sensitivity. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the location of SMEs influence their access to finance and suggest that the growth and productivity of SMEs outside the main cities may be harmed by the fact that they face stronger financial constraints.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (p), Roberto Ganau

Martin Andersson