Family firms and the great crisis: evidence from the italian case

Few studies have analyzed how family firms have acted during the global great crisis in comparison to their nonfamily counterparts. This paper tries to fill this gap on the basis of the Italian experience using a sample of almost 4,500 for 2007 and 2010. We study whether family control affects labour productivity, labour costs and competitiveness and if the adoption of performance related pay (PRP) reveals an efficacious strategy to mitigate the effects of the crisis and reduce the gap in competitiveness with respect to nonfamily firms. We use quantile regression techniques to test the heterogeneous role of PRP and pay attention for its possible endogeneity. We have observed that after the outburst of the crisis, the distance in terms of competitiveness of family firms with respect to their nonfamily counterparts has been amplified. We also find that family firms may take advantage from the adoption of incentive schemes, such as PRP, to encourage commitment and motivation from their employees more than nonfamily firms. The positive role of PRP on labour productivity, coupled with a moderate influence of these schemes on wage premiums, enable them to regain competitiveness also under hostile pressures, as those featuring the strong global crisis.

A numerical and experimental study on energy saving solutions for mobile hydraulic machinery

Energy saving in mobile hydraulic machinery, aimed to fuel consumption reduction, has been one of the principal interests of many researchers and OEMs in the last years. Many different solutions have been proposed and investigated in the literature in order to improve the fuel efficiency, from novel system architectures and strategies to control the system to hybrid solutions. This thesis deals with the energy analysis of a hydraulic system of a middle size excavator through mathematical tools. In order to conduct the analyses the multibody mathematical model of the hydraulic excavator under investigation will be developed and validated on the basis of experimental activities, both on test bench and on the field. The analyses will be carried out considering the typical working cycles of the excavators defined by the JCMAS standard. The simulations results will be analysed and discussed in detail in order to define different solutions for the energy saving in LS hydraulic systems. Among the proposed energy saving solutions, energy recovery systems seem to be very promising for fuel consumption reduction in mobile machinery. In this thesis a novel energy recovery system architecture will be proposed and described in detail. Its dimensioning procedure takes advantage of the dynamic programming algorithm and a prototype will be realized and tested on the excavator under investigation. Finally the energy saving proposed solutions will be compared referring to the standard machinery architecture and a novel hybrid excavator with an energy saving up to 11% will be presented.