Italian manufacturing ¯rms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the e®ects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on ¯rms' productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper investigates whether there is convergence in Total Factor Productivity towards the technological frontier at the establishment level. We find convergence to the frontier is statistically and quatatively important, suggesting the existence of technology spillovers. Foreign...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature Ö the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

Since the 1990s, efficiency and benchmarking analysis has increasingly been used in network utilities research and regulation. A recurrent concern is the effect of environmental factors that are beyond the influence of firms (observable heterogeneity) and factors that are not identifiable...

Empirical work on regional growth under spatial spillovers uses two workhorse models: the spatial Solow model and Verdoorn's model. This paper contrasts these two views on regional growth processes and demonstrates that in a spatial setting the speed of convergence is heterogenous in both...

This paper examines the impact of floods on firms' capital accumulation, employment growth and productivity by using a difference-in-difference approach and considering firms' asset structure. We find evidence that companies in flooding regions show higher growth of total assets and employment...

We explore the evolution of the structure and performance of a social network in a population of individuals who search for local optima in diverse and dynamic task environments. Individuals choose whether to innovate or imitate and, in the latter case, from whom to learn. The probabilities of...

Sectoral shifts, such as shrinkage of low labour productivity and the low-wage construction sector, can lead to apparent increased aggregate average labour productivity and average wages, especially when capital intensity differs across sectors. For 11 main sectors and 13 manufacturing...

This paper models total factor productivity (TFP) in space and proposes an empirical model for TFP interdependence across spatial locations. The interdependence is assumed to occur due to age-structured human capital dynamics. A semi-parametric spatial vector autoregressive framework is...