Which features did belong peculiarly to England so as to make it the only possible cradle of the Industrial Revolution? The present work shows that, by combining the effect of relative prices with the joint effect of scale economies and demand, it is possible to provide a purely economic...

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...

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new...

This paper investigates how investment in automation-intensive goods impacts on worker flows at the firm level and, within firms, across occupational categories. Resorting to an integrated dataset encompassing detailed information on firms, their imports, and employer-employee data for French...

This paper deals with the complex relationship between innovation and the labor market, analyzing the impact of new technological advancements on overall employment, skills and wages. After a critical review of the extant literature and the available empirical studies, novel evidence is...