The present System of National Accounts (SNA93) treats durable consumption goods as consumption goods rather than investment although rentals for owner occupied households is imputed into GDP. We argue that households de facto treat the purchase of durable goods as investments and thus, the...

Aim of this paper is to explore the main drivers of outsourcing of knowledge intensive business services by Italian manufacturing firms. While anecdotal and empirical evidence has emphasized labour cost and scale economies as behind firms' choices to outsource production or service activities,...

This paper investigates the relationship between indicators for the intensity of use of ICT (examining three different types of ICT widely used in firms: internal, e-sales, e-procurement IS), several forms of workplace organization, and human capital on one hand, and several measures of...

In this paper I analyze the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) on compensation shares of high-, medium-, and low-skilled workers. Com- pared to other studies, I investigate this question using a considerably richer data set with respect to the length of time series, set of...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effect of durable goods and ICT on Euro Area economic growth and productivity change; when expenditure on consumer durables is recorded as capital investment. The capitalization of consumer durables impacts both the levels and growth rates of the...

General purpose technologies (GPT) have a significant impact on economic activity through radical technological change and wide technological diffusion. This paper aims to address the generality of technologies associated with the GPT concept. Information and communications technologies (ICT),...

Stronger productivity growth in the US than the EU over the late 1990s is widely attributed to faster, more widespread adoption of information and communication technology (ICT). The literature has emphasised complementarities in production between ICT and internal restructuring as an important...

This paper considers the impact that technology has on firms' choices over organisational form, in particular whether to produce inhouse or outsource and offshore services, and firms' decision over the location of activity. Technology reduces the transaction and adjustment costs of moving...

Between 1993 and 1995, the majority of German firms in services introduced new organizational practices (OC), in particular total quality management systems, certified ISO 9000, lean administration, flatter hierarchies, delegation of authority and ICT-enabled organizational changes). This paper...