This paper surveys 67 contributions on internationalisation and performance of Italian enterprises. It covers empirical studies (including working papers), published between 1992 and 2014, taking a microeconomic perspective and analysing the potential links between firms’ global involvement...

This paper empirically analyzes the boundaries of a large sample of Italian multinational enterprises, with firm-level data from Capitalia, AIDA and Centrale dei Bilanci. Within the broad array of feasible contracts in a foreign country, we focus on the trade-off between international...

Joint ventures (JVs) are a very common form of inter-firm collaborations and, not surprisingly, the object of a vast literature, spanning from economics to management and business studies. Issues of control are central to the definition of JV, which naturally begs an interpretation in the...

This paper provides new contract-level evidence on control rights allocation in order to define what makes a joint venture. Property rights theory of the firm identifies circumstances under which joint control alleviates investment distortions due to contract incompleteness. We compare...

This paper provides original evidence about Chinese and Indian Outward Direct Investment in Italy. Firm-level data have been collected through survey interviews involving the whole population of Dragon and Elephant multinationals. With a response rate of 80%, we draw a detailed profile of the...

This paper surveys recent contributions about internationalization and performance of Italian enterprises. It covers both theoretical and empirical studies taking a microeconomic perspective and studying a potential link between firms’ global involvement and heterogeneity in economic, human...

This paper explores the link between sourcing and performance for a representative sample of manufacturing firms located in Lombardy, the leading economic region in Italy. Survey estimation methods, applied to the authors’ original database, reveal that there exist some performance premia for...

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the quot;black boxquot; - traditionally explored by the theorists of the...

In this paper we investigate the choice of FDI versus joint-venture, made by Italian, Spanish and Swiss multinationals in China, as shaped by the risk of Dissipation of Intangible Assets. Probit estimates, based on an entirely new firm-level dataset, constructed by the author, show that FDI is...

This paper provides new contract-level evidence on control rights allocation in order to define what makes a joint venture. Property rights theory of the firm identifies circumstances under which joint control alleviates investment distortions due to contract incompleteness. We compare...