The traditional economics of innovation, inspired by Schumpeter and more recent advances on his work, seem unable to explain why firms with similar external conditions may show greatly different performance in innovation. Contrastingly, the literature on corporate governance provides some useful...

The paper explores the question whether the relationship between corporate governance and innovation is affected by the extent to which the firm is exposed to agency problems and asset specificity issues. In particular, we argue that different combinations of asset specificity and agency costs...

We propose an intuitive and simple-to-implement empirical classification of management models, based on whether agency issues are tackled by hierarchical monitoring or incentive contracts. The analysis of granular data from a large sample of Italian private firms reveals that the adoption of...

If democracy is undoubtedly good for political organizations, why it shouldn’t be attractive alsofor economic organizations? Most economists have never taken this question seriously. This is a hard question to answer, indeed. Yet, contrary to the common presumption that the capitalistic mode...