The industrial structure of many European countries is dominated by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Although SMEs consider the new product development process fundamental for the success in the global market, the level of formalisation of the innovation process is very low (Slywotzky et...

Following the growing interest towards the role of the knowledge in the modern economies the economic literature has focused a lot of studies into the role of the producers of new knowledge, e.g. universities and public research institutions. The relations between these bodies and the firms, the...

Aim of this paper is to analyse tacit transfers of knowledge from Cnr Institutes of Turin Research Area to the subjects that could get benefits in the 1995-’97 period. This work uses the data from Cnr final balance-sheets, integrated with internal administrative documents of the Institutes....

Patent citations have been widely used in order to study inter-technology and science-technology relations. The present work aims at: i) exploring time relations and distance between technical/innovative activities and scientific knowledge, using journal articles citations in patents as a proxy;...

Nanosciences and nanotechnologies (NST) are a developing scientifictechnological area in full expansion and evolution. Their character of General Purpose Technology has been assessed. Asian countries play a relevant role in the evolutionary path and growth of NST, as in some cases they present a...

In this paper we look at both the theoretical and empirical behavior of price-cost margins when capital market imperfections affect firms’ markup policies. We present a model of a firm operating in an industry with differentiated products and facing imperfect markets for financing operations....

This paper investigates whether financial pressure has an impact on the performance of state-owned firms. By combining different theoretical frameworks, we explore the conditions under which debt discipline becomes effective even for state firms. Using a panel of 1318 Italian state and private...

This paper estimates regional economic efficiency differentials at the firm level in the Italian manufacturing sector over the period 1998-2003. We implement an input distance function approach providing measures of both technical inefficiency and allocative distortions in the choice of input...

The aim of this paper is to account for the impact of statistical noise and exogenous regulatory and environmental factors on the efficiency of public transit systems in a DEA-based framework. To this end, we implement a three-stage DEA-SFA mixed approach based on Fried et al. (2002) using a...

In this paper we estimate cost efficiency and technological characteristics of public hospitals in Piemonte over the period from 2000 to 2004. During the Nineties, different regulatory reforms aiming at controlling health expenditure affected the Italian National Health Service, ranging from the...