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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

Although open source software has recently attracted a relevant body of economic literature, a formal treatment of the process of com- petition with its proprietary counterpart is still missing. Starting from an epidemic model of innovation di?usion, we try to ?ll this gap. We propose a model...

Although FDI have been at the forefront of economic debate since a long time, economists have not yet developed a unified framework for their investigation. In this paper, we put forward the idea that an essential point to analyze FDI concerns their underpinning motives. Motives are at the core...