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...

In this work, we explore the relations between sales growth and a set of innovation indicators that capture the different sources, modes and results of the innovative activity undertaken within firms. We exploit a rich panel on innovation activity of Spanish manufacturing firms, reporting...

This article explores the impact of innovation, offshoring and demand on profits and wage dynamics. The growing relevance of functional distribution in terms of explaining personal distribution underscores the importance of our results for understanding recent increases in inequality. The...

This article shows - on both conceptual and empirical grounds - the importance of business cycles in affecting key relationships between innovation and international performance. While periods of upswing are characterised by a well documented 'virtuous circle'. between innovation inputs, new...

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation - in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity - on labour demand have proven to be not...

In this work, we investigate the interrelations among technology, output and employment in the different states of the U.S. economy (recessions vs. expansions). More precisely, we estimate different threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) models with TFP, hours, and GDP, employing the latter as...

This paper asks whether the level of integration of world countries in the international network of temporary human mobility can explain differences in their per-capita income and labor productivity. We disentangle the role played by global country centrality in the network from traditional...

This paper examines the dynamics of technical change in the Italian locomotive industry in the period 1850-1913. From an historical point of view, this industry presents a major point of interest: it was one of the few relatively sophisticated "high-tech" sectors in which Italy, a latecomer...

The paper proposes a model that explains cross-country growth divergences over time for different aspects of structural change. The model formalises the links between production technology, firm organisation (functional composition of employment) on the supply side and the endogenous evolution...