The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries' production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies pursued by various governments have succeeded. It...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on olitical events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy’s financial...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. The paper focuses on political events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...

How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? To answer this question, we build a firm dynamics model, where we allow firms to invest in innovation and/or political connection to advance their productivity and to overcome certain market frictions. Our...

This study uses firm level data from two detailed surveys of Italian manufacturing firms to study the relationship between R&D expenditures and productivity growth. The analysis considers the different contributions of various forms of R&D (product, process, internal, external in collaboration...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

Our paper adds empirical evidence on the causal effects of exporting on firms' performances. Using a rich database on Italian manufacturing firms, we test the self-selection and the post-entry effects hypotheses with respect to various firms' characteristics. Our analysis supports the idea that...

The paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We run standard panel-data Gibrat regressions, suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints (proxied by cash flow scaled by...