The paper examines the main trends of sectoral specialization and geographic concentration of the manufacturing industry in the Italian Local Labor Systems from 1981 to 2001. The main results are the following - both specialization and concentration show a tendency, although very weak, to...

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate...

We investigate the factors behind the recent decline in the U.S. share of world merchandise exports in an attempt to determine how big a role the changing productivity of U.S. firms has played. We do so against the backdrop of a measure of cost competitiveness which, insofar it is inferred from...