This paper investigates some crucial aspects of the recent development of industrial districts in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where this type of spatial agglomeration of industrial firms has flourished since the period immediately after the Second World War. In particular, it is aimed at...

The microeconomic empirical literature devoted to the link between innovation and employment tends to suggest that technological change has a positive effect on jobs, at least at the level of the firm. The main purpose of this paper is to see whether this result still holds in a situation where...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and...

The purpose of this paper is to test the possible catalysing role of in-house R&D in fostering the complementarity of innovative inputs on a sample of 3045 manufacturing firms drawn from the third Italian Community Innovation Survey (1998-2000). The interactions between four different sources of...

In this paper we investigate the effect of local banking development on firms' innovative activities, using a rich data set on innovation for a large number of Italian firms over the 1990's. There is evidence that banking development affects the probability of process innovation, particularly...