The paper provides new, more detailed evidence on the productivity of manufacturing firms across Italian local labour markets by analysing a large firm-level database covering the 1995-2006 period. The analysis identifies two types of highly agglomerated areas - large cities and industrial...

Switching costs are a key determinant of market performance. This paper tests their existence in the corporate loan market in which they are likely to play a central role because of the complexity of contracts and the relevance of informational problems. Using very detailed data at bank–firm...

We propose two model-based measures of the intensity of local and global agglomeration patterns at the industry level. Spatial plant dispersion in a given industry is modeled as the outcome of an error components process that provides a convenient framework for the simultaneous treatment of...

This paper investigates spatial agglomeration across industries in Italy, by using indexes controlling for the effects of chance and plants size. Data on 100 industrial manufacturing sectors in 1996 show that centripetal forces prevail over centrifugal ones. Econometric results show that...

We use Italian firm-level data to investigate the impact of trade openness on the distribution of firms across marginal cost levels. In so doing, we implement a procedure that allows us to control not only for the standard transmission bias identified in firm-level TFP regressions but also for...