Innovation is widely acknowledged as one of the main forces driving economic growth. However, despite our significant knowledge of the technological determinants of innovation processes, an adequate understanding of demand side factors is still lacking. This paper aims to survey the literature...

This paper investigates the size and scope of global production sharing in the telecom sector by analysing the international pattern of trade in telecom parts and components using bilateral trade statistics over the period 1978-2000. The results show that since 1995 the US have taken over the...

The idea that innovation leads to positive economic performance has become a sort of truism in recent years. However, empirical evidence showing that innovating organizations and countries outperform non-innovating ones remains scant and scattered. In many ways, the jury is still out. First of...

A paradox seems to emerge about the extraordinary Chilean growth performance during the last two decades. Indeed, the export-led growth model was based on the export of natural resource based products characterized by low-income elasticity of demand while the productive structure was suffering a...

The aim of the paper is threefold. First it empirically investigates the effect of international migration on poverty in origin countries, using data from a cross country analysis. Second it investigates the specific part of the income distribution from which migrants are drawn from, by...

We study the effect of financing constraints on the decision to do R&D and on the level of R&D investment using survey data and complete financial accounting data on a large number of Italian manufacturing SMEs from 2001 to 2003. We use a direct indicator of credit constraints and employ an...

Knowledge-intensive activities are bound by imperfections that limit the provision of incentives, particularly asymmetric information about inputs and unclear definition of outputs. Thus, performance-based incentives are not possible. We then model a contract in which the firm can use the...

The Innovation Act was introduced by the French government in 1999, with the aim of encouraging academic institutions to protect and commercialize their scientists’ inventions. We explore the effects of the Act on the distribution of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over academic...

develop an endogenous growth model to study the long run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm’s production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream one....

This paper investigates the skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that skill variety of...