The aim of this paper is to evaluate the causal effect of foreign acquisition on R&D intensity in targeted domestic firms. We are able to distinguish domestic multinationals and nonmultinationals, which allows us to investigate the fear that the change in ownership of domestic to foreign...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We...

Language is a strong and robust determinant of international trade patterns: Countries sharing a common language trade significantly more with each other than countries using different languages, holding other factors constant. In this paper, we show that this trade-promoting effect of language...

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions...

The aim of this paper is to measure the extent to which lower wages in R&D functions reflect a preference effect. In contrast to the bulk of the literature on compensating wage differentials that compares wage levels of jobs with different attributes, we constructed measures of willingness to...

This paper discusses the determinants of product innovation in young innovative companies (YICs) by looking at in-house and external R&D and at the acquisition of external technology in embodied and disembodied components. These input-output relationships are tested on a sample of innovative...

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits and innovation using plant level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a...

"Using a balanced panel of 215 Italian manufacturing firms over the 1995-2000 period, this paper investigates the determinants of R&D investment at the level of the firm. While finding further support for the well-established technology-push and demand-pull hypotheses, this study also tests the...

We investigate whether inward FDI, either at the firm or industry level, has any impact on product innovation by Chinese State owned enterprises (SOEs). We use a comprehensive firm level panel data set of Chinese SOEs covering the period 1999 to 2003. Our results show that foreign capital...