The paper investigates the effect of spatial agglomeration on firm exit. In particular, the role of specialization and local variety in production is addressed. The extent to which industrial clusters can be actually retained industrial districts is also considered. Empirical evidence is...

The paper analyzes how (production and financial) inter-firm networks can affect firms’ default probabilities and observed default rates: an issue the recent crisis has brought to the front of the debate. A simple theoretical model of shock transfer is built up to investigate some stylized...

The paper aims at investigating the role that one country's position in the international trade network has in attracting knowledge and technology flows to it. By referring to "indirect" Research and Development (R&D) spillovers, we argue that not only is this position responsible for the number...

The paper analyzes the impact of localization, urbanization and competition on firm-level TFP, using a large sample of Italian firm-level data from 1999 to 2007. In particular, the paper explores the nonlinearities of such effects, accounting for the possible presence of critical masses and/or...

This paper investigates the drivers of the environmental innovations (EI) introduced by firms in local production systems (LPS). The role of firm network relationships, agglomeration economies and internationalization strategies is analysed for a sample of 555 firms in the Emilia-Romagna region,...

The paper analyzes how (production and financial) inter-firm networks can affect firms’ default probabilities and observed default rates. A simple theoretical model of shock transfer is built to investigate some stylized facts on how firm-idiosyncratic shocks are allocated in the network, and...

The paper investigates the effect of spatial agglomeration on firm exit in a dynamic framework. Using a large dataset at the industry-province level for Italy (1998–2007), we estimate a spatial dynamic panel model via a GMM estimator and analyze the short-run impact of specialization and...

We investigate how the country’s absorptive capacity and relative backwardness affect the impact of international R&D spillovers on domestic Total Factor Productivity (TFP). To account for nonlinearities, we adopt a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) approach, where the country’s...

In a much cited paper, Wolfgang Keller (Are international R&D spillovers trade-related? Analyzing spillovers among randomly matched trade partners, European Economic Review, 48, 1469-1481, 1998) claims that international R&D spillovers are global and trade-unrelated. In following works, Keller...