This paper studies the case of the Marche footwear districts. Statistical evidence and interviews with entrepreneurs suggest that the traditional inter-firm relationships within these districts have significantly changed during the past decade. Some leading firms have been building up more...

In the last decade the Italian economy has underperformed compared both with the previous decades and with the main European countries. It is widely acknowledged that this evolution reflects unresolved structural problems, which have become more urgent in view of the major changes in the world...

In the last decade, and especially in the course of the recent global economic slowdown, the gap between southern and northern industry has widened. Industrial investment and employment decreased more sharply in the South than in the rest of Italy, and the contribution of the southern regions to...

Unobservable labor utilization is recognized as a crucial feature of economic fluctuations. Yet very little is known on the behavior of work effort over the business cycle. By using firm-level panel data drawn from two high-quality sources, we obtain a microeconomic estimate of variable labor...

This paper analyses the relationship between international fragmentation of production, trade openness and global export performance in the European Union from 2000 to 2009. As most trade models featuring international production sharing show, the higher the level of fragmentation and related...

Both macro and (still scarce) micro evidence support the idea that a new economy is emerging in the US, not (yet) in Europe. Some have argued that the inadequacies of Europe�s financial system are an important part of the explanation. This paper, after surveying the existing literature on...

This paper investigates the incentives of experts competing to influence decision making. Competition for influence is shown to have an ambiguous effect on truthtelling incentives and a decision maker might be better off relying on one source of information only. This result has important...

We investigate the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) in Italian manufacturing using microdata. We find a positive correlation at firm level between ICT investment, human capital of the labor force and reorganization. Starting from row data, we build a measure of ICT...

This paper analyzes the characteristics of Italian firms involved in global value chains (�intermediate� firms) by using the Bank of Italy survey on industrial companies. Intermediate firms show, on average, worse features than �final� firms: smaller size, lower share of...

This paper shows that vertical specialisation can increase the elasticity of trade to income, hence explaining dramatic events such as the great trade collapse. We argue that a change in the extent of vertical specialisation affects the elasticity of trade to income, while a mere change in...