This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions … of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity …. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered alone, are growing with the size of the firm. We investigate this …

Italy ranked last in terms of manufacturing productivity growth according to OECD estimates over the last decade with a …-decile differences in productivity have been increasing. Further, heterogeneous firms' characteristics (i.e. export activity and … productivity. One phenomenon that we observe is what we call a tendency toward 'neo-dualism' involving the co-existence of a small …