Ricerc@Sapienza

This research project aims at evaluating how Italian manufacturing firms reacted to the first Covid-19 outbreak. Emphasis is put on how firms' characteristics and behaviour affect their future performance.
A sample of firms has been interviewed right before and after the covid outbreak to investigate these features. The pre-covid survey covers a wide range of firms' characteristics, including financial and strategic components. The second survey has been conducted to capture the immediate effect of the shock on firms' organization and the change in their future expectations.
The evaluation will be conducted in the methodological frameworks of causal graphs and potential outcomes. The former will be used to recover the causal relations among the variables of interest and encode them into a graph. The obtained graph will then provide the necessary information to choose an identification strategy and estimate causal effects through potential outcomes methods. A novel methodology will also be proposed to deal with uncertainty in the graph structure when estimating causal effects.