Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was experiencing international difficulties, although the slow growth and declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. The paper uses data from the Bank of Italy’s survey of...

This article contributes to the growing empirical literature on family firms by studying the impact of the founder-chief executive officer (CEO) succession in a sample of Italian firms. We contrast firms that continue to be managed within the family by the heirs to the founders with firms in...

This paper aims to analyze the macroeconomic impact of infrastructures through review of the literature, meta-analysis and empirical analysis of the Italian data. We report a general consensus over the positive effects of infrastructures, even though the results are affected by the estimation...

In this paper we compare the magnitude of local productivity advantages associated to two different spatial concentration patterns in Italy, i.e. urban areas (UA) and industrial districts (ID). UA typically display a huge concentration of population and host a wide range of economic activities,...

We compare the magnitude of local productivity advantages associated with two different spatial concentration patterns in Italy � urban areas and industrial districts. The former have high population density and host a wide range of economic activities, while the latter are marked by a high...

The paper analyses the production upgrading supported by investments in quality and brands by Italian firms. To this aim we use the Bank of Italy's survey on manufacturing firms located in industrial districts. Our results show that: 1) advertising is correlated with a number of firm features...