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...

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...

The paper develops an agent-based coordination game in which agents seek, try out and maintain coordination in the presence of positive search and coordination costs. Agents are perfectly rational in the sense that they optimise their individual payoff through coordination. They are moreover...

Macroeconomic models with imperfect competition usually result in theoretical own-price elasticities of labour demand higher than one in absolute value. Yet often empirical studies find much lower estimated elasticities. A Chamberlinian two sectors model of imperfect competition with...

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 paper argues that the shape of the long-run size distribution of business firms is basically determined by the availability of organisational capabilities, and that its changes over time (the "direction" of change) depend on the way in which (exogenous) "environmental" conditions affect...

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:...