Maria Michela Dickson

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• PhD Economic Statistics
• Professor (Full) at University of Padua

In recent years, spatial sampling has been the subject of a flourishing literature. Its use had become widespread due to the availability of topographical information about statistical units, especially in the environmental context. New algorithms enable us to take advantage of spatial locations directly. In this paper, we present a new way of usin...

Knowledge spillovers are abundantly investigated in the literature as important sources of entrepreneurship. However, the absorption mechanisms of knowledge spillovers by firms are complex and, in some cases, heavily constrained by barriers that allow firms to enter the market but then hinder them from remaining and becoming incumbents. This paper...

This study investigates the relationship between environmental sustainability policies and tourism flows across Italian provinces using a Spatial Durbin Error Model (SDEM) within a gravity framework. By incorporating both public and corporate environmental initiatives, the analysis highlights the direct and spatial spillover effects of sustainabili...

Tourism has emerged as a significant driver of the global economy. As its economic impact grows, concerns regarding environmental sustainability have intensified. This paper explores the dual dimensions of sustainable tourism: the relationship between tourism supply and sustainability, and tourist demand characteristics. It highlights the critical...

The transition to more environmentally sustainable production processes and managerial practices is an increasingly important topic. Many industries need to undergo radical change to meet environmental sustainability requirements; the air transport industry is no exception. In this respect, a particular aspect that needs further attention is the re...

The study aimed to explore whether the 1-in-X bias is also present in relation to immigration growth rates. We tested this research question on a representative sample of adult residents in Trento, Italy, between March and April 2019. Participants were presented with data comparing the foreign immigrant-to-resident population ratio in Italy for 200...

The paper provides novel empirical evidence about the effects of spatial externalities on the survival of Innovative Startups in Italy. Using geocoded firm‐level data, we build micro‐geographic measures of specialization and diversity that are robust to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Estimates of spatial externalities are obtained through survi...

The authors examine some criminological theories that explain adherence to the rules, and in particular those that have been used to account for whether or not the rules imposed or proposed to contain the contagion from COVID-19 are considered. Then, they show the results of their own research, carried out by interviewing a sample of 1,004 Italians...

Immigrants might be perceived as a threat to a country’s jobs, security, and cultural identity. In this study, we aimed to test whether individuals with higher numerical, scientific, and economic literacy were more polarized in their perception of immigration, depending on their cultural worldview orientation. We measured these variables in a repre...

The transition to more environmentally sustainable production processes and managerial practices is an increasingly important topic. Many industries need to undergo radical change to meet environmental sustainability requirements; the tourism industry is no exception. In this respect, a particular aspect that needs further attention is the relation...

This chapter aims at illustrating the statistical procedures adopted to estimate the unknown values of the parameters of interest of the forest inventory. In particular, it firstly describes how the data collected during the second phase of the sampling plan have been used to estimate the areal extents of the different land use and cover categories...

This paper presents the R package plot3logit which enables the covariate effects of trinomial regression models to be represented graphically by means of a ternary plot. The aim of the plot is helping the interpretation of regression coefficients in terms of the effects that a change in values of regressors has on the probability distribution of th...

Balanced sampling is a random method for sample selection, the use of which is preferable when auxiliary information is available for all units of a population. However, implementing balanced sampling can be a challenging task, and this is due in part to the computational efforts required and the necessity to respect balancing constraints and inclu...

Under-coverage and nonresponse problems are jointly present in most socio-economic surveys. The purpose of this paper is to propose an estimation strategy that accounts for both problems by performing a two-step calibration. The first calibration exploits a set of auxiliary variables only available for the units in the sampled population to account...

The application of spatial Cliff–Ord models requires information about spatial coordinates of statistical units to be reliable, which is usually the case in the context of areal data. With micro-geographic point-level data, however, such information is inevitably affected by locational errors, that can be generated intentionally by the data produce...

The 2020 year has been characterized by an unprecedented epidemic that has involved all countries in the world. The Covid-19 emergency is having a strong impact on all aspects of everyday life, including services to education. The shift to emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 has had a strong impact on training procedures, with the conse...

The Pareto and the Log-normal distributions can be characterised by having constant inequality curves. After providing formal proofs, these results will be exploited to obtain graphical and analytical tools for analysis and goodness-of-fit tests for these distributions. Order-statistics-based estimators of the curves will be presented and discussed...

The paper studies the impact of formal collaboration agreements (FCA) on firms’ growth in Italy. To conduct a proper evaluation exercise, we started building a novel database of Italian firms where networked firms in 2012 (treated units) are matched with firms that did not subscribe to a formal network agreement (controls units) but possess similar...

Private to private corruption is a global phenomenon, affecting developing and developed countries, that has been largely under-addressed, especially when comparing with public corruption and it gained the attention of academy recently. The lacking existing research on private to private corruption makes necessary the development of instruments and...

In this chapter, we propose a novel methodology that aims at establishing what is the role of “location” in shaping firm growth. Along with the traditional determinants (like, e.g., age, size, financial constraints and others), geographical location is alleged to drive firm growth. The current literature typically relies on location variables that...

Aims of the study. Assessment of growth is essential to support sustainability of forest management and forest policies. The objective of the study was to develop a species-specific model to predict the annual increment of tree basal area through variables recorded by forest surveys, to assess forest growth directly or in the context of more comple...

Many studies have analyzed empirically the determinants of survival for innovative startup companies using data about the characteristics of entrepreneurs and management or focusing on firm- and industry-specific variables. However, no attempts have been made so far to assess the role of the environmental sustainability of the production process. B...

Political orientation polarizes the attitudes of more educated individuals on controversial issues. A highly controversial issue in Europe is immigration. We found the same polarizing pattern for opinion toward immigration in a representative sample of citizens of a southern European middle-size city. Citizens with higher numeracy, scientific and e...

A characterizing property of Zenga (1984) inequality curve is exploited in order to develop an estimator for the extreme value index of a distribution with regularly varying tail. The approach proposed here has a nice graphical interpretation which provides a powerful method for the analysis of the tail of a distribution. The properties of the prop...

In the last few decades, sampling theory has been given a substantial boost by the growing availability of geo-referenced finite populations. Unfortunately, geo-referentiation is often incomplete or affected by locational errors for a portion of the units. Spatial sampling methods produce efficient estimates but suffer from consequences of flaws in...

Background: The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in China at the end of 2019 and it has since spread in few months all over the World. Italy was one of the first Western countries who faced the health emergency and is one of the countries most severely affected by the pandemic. The diffusion of Corona...

This paper aims at investigating empirically whether and to what extent the containment measures adopted in Italy had an impact in reducing the diffusion of the COVID-19 disease across provinces. For this purpose, we extend the multivariate time-series model for infection counts proposed in Paul and Held (Stat Med 30(10):118–1136, 2011) by augmenti...

When a regression analysis is performed on a variable that exhibits some form of spatial dependence, Gauss-Markov assumptions about the exogeneity of regressors and independence amongst error terms may be violated. If this is the case and no information is available about the location of units, point estimators and standard error estimators are typ...

Many studies have analyzed empirically the determinants of survival for innovative startup companies using data about the characteristics of entrepreneurs and management or focusing on firm- and industry-specific variables. However, no attempts have been made so far to assess the role of the environmental sustainability of the production process. B...

Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has been firstly detected in China at the end of 2019 and it spread in few months all over the world. Italy is the second country in the World for number of cases, and the diffusion of COVID-19 has followed a peculiar spatial pattern. However, the interest of scientific commu...

Background: The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in China at the end of 2019 and it has since spread in few months all over the World. Italy was one of the first Western countries who faced the health emergency and is one of the countries most severely affected by the pandemic. The diffusion of COVID-1...

Background: The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in China at the end of 2019 and it has since spread in few months all over the World. Italy was one of the first Western countries who faced the health emergency and is one of the countries most severely affected by the pandemic. The diffusion of Coronav...

This paper represents a frst attempt to model and predict the spatio-temporal distribution of Coronavirus (COVID-19) infections at NUTS-3 regional level in Italy. The statistical endemic-epidemic multivariate areal count time-series model introduced by Paul and Held (2011), and further refined by Meyer and Held (2014), is employed. Despite being ve...

The application of state-of-the-art spatial econometric models requires that the information about the spatial coordinates of statistical units is completely accurate, which is usually the case in the context of areal data. With micro-geographic point-level data, however, such information is inevitably affected by locational errors, that can be gen...

Under-coverage and nonresponse problems are jointly present in most socio-economic surveys. The purpose of this paper is to propose a completely design-based estimation strategy that accounts for both problems without resorting to models but simply performing a two-step calibration. The first calibration exploits a set of auxiliary variables only a...

Multinomial logit (also termed multi-logit) models permits the analysis of the statistical relation between a categorical response variable and a set of explicative variables (called covariates or regressors). Although multinomial logit is widely used in both the social and economic sciences, the interpretation of regression coefficients may be tri...

When conducting firm-level surveys, a relevant aspect in sampling design is to guarantee that the selected sample of business units is representative of the population. Stratified sampling design is used to obtain a representative sample. However, stratification of the main characteristics of establishments may not always be computationally feasibl...

The Zenga (1984) inequality curve is constant in p for Type I Pareto distributions. We show that this property holds exactly only for the Pareto distribution and, asymptotically, for distributions with power tail with index -a, with a greater than 1. Exploiting these properties one can develop powerful tools to analyze and estimate the tail of a di...

The Zenga (1984) inequality curve is constant in p for Type I Pareto distributions. This characterizing behavior will be exploited to obtain graphical and analytical tools for tail analysis and goodness of fit tests. A testing procedure for Pareto-type behavior based on a regression of technique will be introduced.

Private-to-private corruption has become an agenda-topping issue over the past twenty years because of the increasing role played by the private sector in providing public services and in controlling key sectors of the economy (Argandoña, 2003). Despite growing awareness of its extent and problematic nature, this phenomenon is still poorly defined...

The recent increased availability of information about the micro-geographic positions of population units in environmental surveys has led to important developments in spatial sampling methodologies and, as a result, has improved the estimation accuracy. In real data, however, information about the location of units is often affected by inaccuracy...

Although the variance-gamma distribution is a flexible model for log-returns of financial assets, so far it has found rather limited applications in finance and risk management. One of the reasons is that maximum likelihood estimation of its parameters is not straightforward. We develop an EM-type algorithm based on Nitithumbundit and Chan (2015) that...

Measuring the degree of spatial spreading of a sample can be of great interest when sampling from a spatial population. The commonly used spatial balance index by Grafstrom et al. (2012) is particularly effective in comparing the level of spatial spreading of different samples from the same population. However, its unbounded and uninterpretable sca...

Consider a distribution F with regularly varying tails of index −α. An estimation strategy for α, exploiting the relation between the behavior of the tail at infinity and of the characteristic function at the origin, is proposed. A semi-parametric regression model does the job: a nonparametric component controls the bias and a parametric one produc...

Measuring the degree of spatial spreading of a sample can be of great interest when sampling from a spatial population. The commonly used spatial balance index by Grafstr\"om et al. (2012) is particularly effective in comparing the level of spatial spreading of different samples from the same population. However, its unbounded and uninterpretable s...

Effects of missing data and locational errors on spatial concentration measures based on Ripley’s K-function. Spatial Economic Analysis. Measures based on Ripley’s K-function are the preferred tools to test the concentration of individual agents in an economic space. In many empirical cases, however, the datasets contain different inaccuracies due...

Due to the increasing availability of georeferenced microdata in several fields of research, surveys can benefit greatly from the use of the most recent spatial sampling methods. These methods facilitate selection of spatially balanced samples, which lead to particularly efficient estimates, by incorporating the distances between the exact location...

We investigate perceived job security risk and the distribution of non-labour income between spouses in a household context. In the process, the restrictions implied by Beckerian-caring preferences in the Chiappori (2002) Collective model are considered, and estimates of the sharing rule are derived. The findings support the idea of household forma...

The analysis of horizontal inequalities in the educational yields has recently raised an increasing interest, as they explain a larger portion of the inequalities in the labour market, both in terms of wages and in terms of employment risk. This paper analyses the horizontal inequalities in terms of one-year employment risk for bachelor and master’...

Since 2006, Red Tape has been a hot topic for the European Commission. All the European Countries agreed in reducing the costs that enterprises have to face due to Administrative Burdens (AB). Each Country has implemented his own simplification plans in order to move from the Red Tape to better regulation. Trentino’s local governments both 1) issue...

Recently, business registers have been provided with geographical information about units, making possible to conduct spatial studies on firms. Sometimes these data result perturbed respect to their real geographical locations, owing to privacy and technical problems in geo-coding phase. These problems lead to non-sampling errors particularly relev...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the contents and the didactic approach that characterize, respectively, the “Introductory Statistics with R ” and “Statistics and Foresight” courses of the Master in Social Foresight. Design/methodology/approach – The two courses “Introductory Statistics with R” and “Statistics and Foresight” are d...

Il software di calcolo Excel consente di svolgere calcoli complessi, anche su grandi quantità di dati, e si rivela un ottimo supporto nel campo delle analisi statistiche per le numerose funzionalità dedicate. Questo libro presenta una guida esauriente all’utilizzo degli strumenti di analisi statistica di Excel ed è di interesse sia per studenti uni...

We propose an approach to the analysis of the spatial dynamics of firm formation/exit based on micro-geographic data.•We illustrate the use of the space-time inhomogeneous K-function to detect the spatio-temporal clustering of firm entries and firm exits generated by the interaction between economic agents.•We show the results of an empirical appli...

An innovative use of spatial sampling designs is here presented. Sampling methods which consider spatial locations of statistical units are already used in agricultural and environmental contexts, while they have never been exploited for establishment surveys. However, the rapidly increasing availability of georeferenced information about business...

The tendency of economic activities to cluster in a specific territory is well recognized. This phenomenon is not fortuitous, by concentrating in some areas firms enjoy a number of advantages, which then have implications for local economic growth and regional disparities and, as a consequence, are object of study in the fields of economics, geogra...