Was the spinning jenny profitable <i>only</i>in England? No. The present work finds that the jenny was profitable also in France. Such result contrasts recent findings on the topic by revising basic computations on the profitability of the spinning jenny.

This paper presents a critical overview of some recent attempts at building formal models of organizations as information-processing and problem-solving entities. We distinguish between two classes of models according to two distinct objects of analysis. The first class includes models mainly...

This paper examines the determinants of international competitiveness at the level of sectors and firms. First, we address the relation between cost-related and technological competition in a sample of fifteen OECD countries. Results suggest that the countries' sectoral market shares are indeed...

Why was England the cradle of the Industrial Revolution? The present work shows that scale economies and demand, combined with the conditions of the relative prices of input factors, allow to provide a purely economic answer to this question. The labor-saving innovations of the Industrial...

In this work we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification, if any, across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge, proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present. Putting it more emphatically we investigate the relationship between "what a...

This paper analyzes the patterns of market selection in manufacturing industries of France, Germany, UK, and USA. We first disentangle the contribution to industry-level productivity growth of within-firm productivity changes and between-firms reallocation of shares. The evidence corroborates...

The hypothesis underlined in this paper is that apart from infant mortality there is another relevant phenomenon taking place within new-born Small Business Enterprises (SBEs) in the period immediately after entry; namely that the smaller ones among them, having entered with a marked sub-optimal...

This paper is intended to provide an updated discussion on a series of issues that the relevant literature suggests to be crucial in dealing with the challenges a middle income country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status. In particular, the conventional...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the implications that complementary assets needed for the formation of start-ups -proxied by the ease of access to financial resources- have on the innovative efforts of incumbent firms. In particular, we develop a theoretical model,...