This paper analyses the local determinants of producer service growth in Italy, focusing on agglomeration economies, and taking into account the particular features of this sector with respect to manufacturing. Using an OECD classification, we estimate a dynamic specification allowing for...

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...

We study the effects of anti-competitive service regulation by examining whether OECD countries with less anti-competitive regulation see a better economic performance of manufacturing industries using less-regulated services more intensively. Our results indicate that lower service regulation...

The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed retrospective information on major bequests and gifts received by each member of the household. This information is used to estimate the share of intergenerational transfers in total welath and to relate this share to...

Economic convergence at the sub-national level could have spatially explicit manifestations reflecting convergence clubs and other forms of geographical clustering that are not captured by an overall inequality measure. By decomposing the Theil index of per capita income inequality into between...

The paper provides an empirical investigation of labor market pooling. The analysis concentrates on Italian industrial districts and shows that there is fragmentary evidence of a widespread wage premium. In particular, there is no evidence of district differentials for the returns to seniority...

Two main hypotheses are usually put forward to explain the productivity advantages of larger cities: agglomeration economies and firm selection. Combes et al. (2012) propose an empirical approach to disentangle these two effects and fail to find any impact of selection on local productivity...

In the last decade R&D expenditure in Italy has been lagging at a bare 1.2-1.3 per cent of GDP. Its private share is low by international standards and Italian firms take out only a small number of patents. External sources of innovation, however, are available to firms. This work aims at...

This paper evaluates the effects of unanticipated monetary policy shocks on Italian output on the basis of highly disaggregated data and a VAR methodology. The impact of unexpected changes in the money market interest rate on the pattern of industrial production - based on qualitative business...

Many empirical studies have found both inter-industry and intra-industry externalities in the form of local knowledge spillovers in research. This paper makes some assumptions reflecting these empirical regularities in order to analyse their implications for the allocation of economic activities...