We draw upon historical evidence from several countries and contemporary studies of national innovation systems to argue that indigenous systems of academic training and public researchhave been in the past important elements of the institutional structures supporting a country's economic catch...

In this paper, we study the growth rates of 4-digit sectors in U.S. manufacturing. Two measures of size (value of shipments, value added) are considered, for each of the 38 years (1959-1996) of a sample of 458 4-digit sectors, drawn from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database. Whole sample...

The size distribution and growth rates dynamics of U.S. manufacturing firms have been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper, using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis to disaggregated data, studying 15 industrial sectors. We find that among the stylized facts presented in...

The paper analyses the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new niche in the software industry. Using a Chandlerian perspective, this work reports the main facts about firm entry and growth, with a particular focus on start-up strategies and actions. Since scale economies do not...

In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of Italian and US business cycles. After filtering the time series of the main macroeconomic variables of the two countries, through an approximate bandpass filter, we analyze the cross-correlations between each filtered variable and the filtered...

This paper employs an original dataset for 146 US metropolitan areas to test some propositions that characterize two different models of organizing firms and industries: the managerial firm, epitomized by the work of Alfred Chandler, and the entrepreneurial system, recently highlighted by many...

This paper analyzes the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new market niche in the software industry. This work will report the main facts of entry and exit process, focusing on firm post-entry performance, on the different phases of competition during the industry evolution, and...

In this work, inspired by Winter (2006), in fact of vintage 1968, we discuss the relation between three different levels of analysis of technologies, namely as (i) bodies of problem-solving knowledge, (ii) organizational procedures, and (iii) input-output relations. We begin by arguing that the...