This work attempts to shed light on the “information technology productivity paradox”. Employing a large data set of Italian manufacturing firms we compute ICT marginal productivity across different cluster of firms and the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on output...

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed...

This report summarises the findings of a study on the growth factors and growth prospects of the business services (BS)industry, applying an internationally comparative perspective. The report untangles factors behind the extraordinary growth of the BS industry during last decade,comparing it...

This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...

Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of firms in transition countries, which unbundles corruption to measure different types of corrupt transactions and provide detailed information on the characteristics and performance of firms, we find that: i)...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

In a series of classic works, most notably The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), Alfred Chandler focused the spotlight on the large, vertically integrated modern corporation. Put simply, Chandler’s argument is this. In the late nineteenth century, the large vertically integrated...

Nowadays of increasing functioning of network competitors, the Portuguese Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) of the Textile and Clothing Industry are facing new digital challenges. In order to strengthen their market power and reduce their dependence on foreign subcontractors, they should create...

Some forms of environmentalism has generated many positive responses from concerned communities. Sophisticated theories addressing various aspects of environmental policy abound. At the practical level private economic agents following their self-interests confront the challenge of cleaning up...

In this paper we try to explain some restructuring patterns of Czech textile and clothing industries from a microeconomic point of view. We introduce two measures of production efficiency (the technical and the allocative efficiency) and look at changes in the behaviour of enterprises. In 1994,...