This work explores the spatial structure of location of production activities. We try to disentangle location- from sector-specific drivers in the dynamic process of spatial agglomeration. We argue that the former typically apply "horizontally" (i.e. across all industrial sectors), while the...

This work presents a comparative analysis of two crucial dimensions of firms’ performance: profitability and productivity. The characteristics of their empirical distribution and the associated degree of persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non-parametric...

This article presents an analysis of the growth patterns of the worldwide top 200 firms in the pharmaceutical industry. A test of the Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect is performed and we find, in line with previous literature, a violation concerning the variance of growth. Using...

This work analyses the properties of corporate growth in a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. In particular, it focuses on the statistical properties of growth rates and on the influence of proxies for relative efficiency upon relative growth. In line with previous work,...

Are the observed spatial distributions of firms decided mostly by market-mediated, economy-wide locational forces, or rather by non-pecuniary, sector-specific ones? This work finds that the latter kind of forces weight systematically more than the former in deciding firm location. The analysis...

This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...