This paper offers a firm level perspective of global value chain participation in the food industry. Exploiting a very rich and original dataset, based on a 2011 survey of 25,090 Italian firms operating in manufacturing and related services, we characterize the food industry, describing its main...

This paper analyzes the indirect impact of China on the export performance of major European countries (Italy, France, Germany and Spain) in their main destination markets (OECD countries). Given a strong specialization in manufacturing sector, these EU countries are likely to be at risk from...

Africa's biofuel potential over the last ten years has increasingly attracted foreign investors’ attention. We estimate the determinants of foreign investors land demand for biofuel production in SSA, using Poisson specifications of the gravity model. Our estimates suggest that land...

The recent empirical literature on firms’ performance has focused on the multidimensional concept of firms’ managerial strategies. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between firms’ managerial strategies and firms’ performance, accounting for entrepreneur’s specific...

Competition is increasingly crossing borders. However, location still matters: the most successful competitors in an industry often cluster in the same geographic areas and companies use the advantages of location to compete at a global level. When competing across borders, firms can coordinate...

The birth of new firms and their survival in the market are often seen as crucial for economic growth and competitiveness in a modern economy. This paper focuses on business demography of Italian firms, using an original dataset obtained by merging Capitalia-Reprint and AIDA, to identify the...

This paper explores the relevance of supply chains participation on firms’ probability to internationalize. It studies whether being part of a supply chains and/or of an international network increases the likelihood to enter international markets also for smaller and less productive firms....

This paper investigates the links between product quality and the pro-trade effect of ethnic networks using a large panel on trade flows and bilateral stocks of immigrants with information for 19 OECD destination countries and 177 origin countries. In line with the approach of Rauch and Trindade...

This paper analyzes the impact of Chinese competition on developed countries export prices, with a focus on Italy. After a theoretical discussion of the channels affecting export prices in presence of competitors from low income countries, we estimate the pricing behavior of two major...