This paper analyzes the effect of information technologies (IT) in the financial sector using micro-data on a panel of over 600 Italian banks over the period 1989-2000. We estimate stochastic cost and profit functions allowing for individual banks� displacements from the efficient frontier...

Direct and country-specific measures of technical progress are used in order to analyse the effects of technology shocks on output fluctuations in the G7. Technology shocks are measured as the unpredicted component in the dynamics of innovation, on the basis of patent statistics provided by the...

The paper investigates R&D and ICT investment at firm level, assessing their relative importance and the extent to which they are complements or substitutes. We use data on a large unbalanced panel sample from four consecutive waves of a survey of Italian manufacturing firms, together with a...

Technological progress affects early retirement in two opposing ways. On the one hand, it increases real wages and thus produces an incentive to postpone retirement. On the other hand, it erodes workers' skills, making early retirement more likely. Using the Health and Retirement Study surveys,...

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D...

Italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms� productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...

We assess the impact of low-skilled immigration on capital intensity. We first present a model characterized by frictions in the labor market and firms' asymmetric information on workers' skills and show that firms can react to the immigration-induced reduction of their workforce's skill level...

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...