The sector business services contributes directly and indirectly to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The direct contribution comes from the sector’s own dynamism. Though the business-services industry appears to be characterised by strong cyclical volatility, there was also a strong...

This paper presents a firm-level analysis of the productivity slowdown that has been recently observed in Italy. DEA techniques are applied to the firm-level data collected within the annual surveys on the economic accounts of enterprises carried out by the Italian National Statistical Institute...

This paper provides some stylised facts about differences in labour productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) in Estonian firms and about the role of selected determinants of productivity differences. Enterprise level panel data of the whole population of Estonian firms from years...

A vintage capital model where the firm makes decisions about whether to replace or upgrade its old capital stock with new capital is developed in this paper. The model is used to study how technological characteristics of capital affect investment behavior. In particular, it is asked how the...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

This paper examines how international flows of technological knowledge affect economic performance across industries and firms in different countries. Motivated by the large share of the world's technology investments made by firms that are active across borders, we focus on international trade...

In this paper we show that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous impact on capital accumulation. We further show that it is also responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that otherwise would be characterized by unique equilibria. These results explain the...

This paper examines the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on technical production efficiency in a wide range of Italian industries. Technical efficiency, defined as the firm’s distance from the production efficiency frontier, is one important component of...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of capital accumulation where credit is intermediated by banks operating in a Cournot oligopoly. The number of banks affects capital accumulation through two channels. First, it affects the quantity of credit available to entrepreneurs. Second, it...