The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli,...

This paper investigates which factors determine a bank's decision to expand its activities abroad and what determines its choice of the countries to invest in. The empirical analysis is conducted using firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries for a representative sample fo nearly 2,500 OECD banks.

Using data on a sample of Italian manufacturing companies, this paper analyzes the location (at home or abroad) and the mode of organization (outsourcing versus integration) of intermediate inputs production. We find evidence of a productivity ordering (largely consistent with the assumptions in...

While Italy's catch-up in the course of the 20th century has been nothing short of extraordinary, it has failed to produce a large number of global business players. Nonetheless, half a century ago an Italian company concluded what was at the time the largest-ever foreign takeover of a US...

This work presents, in a single framework, the results of several recent studies, carried out by Bank of Italy researchers, on the internationalization of the Italian productive system. The notion of internationalization is considered not only from the perspective of direct investments abroad...

The technology balance of payments concerns external transactions in disembodied technology. Since the introduction in Italy of a new data collection system based mainly on direct reporting by enterprises, credits and debits tend to be appreciably greater than they had been under the old system...

This work contributes to the small but growing body of literature on international trade in services at firm level. Our dataset, based on a new Bank of Italy survey, provides information on exports and imports of services (excluding transportation and travel) in 2008-09 for almost 3,000 Italian...

This paper focuses on how multi-plant firms allocate their workforce and investments between headquarters or plants located in or close to the headquarters area (HQ plants) and those located in the same country but farther away from the headquarters area (non-HQ plants). Using survey data on...