The qualifying aspect of the ongoing changes in firm growth processes seems to be the increased heterogeneity of size and a trend towards a broader fluctuation in average size. Exogenous factors (market size, demand trends, technological innovations, higher competition) determine a different...

The positive impact of intangible assets on several measures of economic performance is well documented in the literature. Less clear is what leads firms to invest in intangible assets in the first place. The latter is particularly important since, at least for the Italian manufacturing sector,...

This Working Paper contains the contributions written in English forthcoming in a Special Issue of the Journal of Industrial and Management Economics / Economia e politica industriale (39, (2), 2012 ). The title (and the topic) of the whole Special Issue is “Competitiveness in Manufacturing:...

In the real world, many social and economic interactions are highly affected by coordination problems. These, in turn, emerge from the trial to dynamically organize strategies of collective action in complex contexts where agents and groups are heterogeneous and information is only imperfectly...

This work is based on the hypothesis that explanation of collective action between firms requires partly different variables from that used in explaining collective action between individuals. In order to look at the problem of what determines collective action, a model has been built using...

Tertiary education attainment of italian labour force, particularly in the manufacturing industry, shows empirically a large gap with respect to the other OECD countries, although human capital growth has been increasingly addressed as one of the main channel towards productivity, competitive...

Il premio di prezzo è solo una componente, non marginale, sicuramente la più caratteristica e facilmente comunicabile, ma certamente non decisiva nel modello Fair Trade. L’avere incentrato l’attenzione su questo specifico aspetto del meccanismo complessivo ha nascosto altri aspetti più...