A recent strand of the economic literature has emphasised the role of services, and in particular knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), as a primary source of knowledge creation and diffusion. Since this transferring process often occurs through strong face-to-face interactions, the role...

Using a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, in this paper we estimate a structural model of research, innovation, productivity and export performance augmented to take account for the role played by local externalities. This model, which is an "enlarged" version of Crepon, Duguet and...

Recent developments in the new international trade theory stressed the relationship between firm heterogeneity and internationalization performance. The key prediction of these models is that firms with different levels of productivity - the main source of firm heterogeneity - will generally...

This paper explores the relation between vertical disintegration and the co-localization of knowledge intensive business service (Kibs) firms in the metropolitan region of Milan, using micro-geographic data and nonparametric methods. Our main results are that: (i) compared to other manufacturing...

In this paper I assess the existence, and the magnitude, of technological externalities in the form of creativity spillovers that affect individual firms' innovative intensity. Relying on a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, I first estimate a knowledge production function; from this,...

In this work we explore how the international outsourcing of production (offshoring) impacts the skill composition of Italian manufacturing firms. In particular, our aim is to assess if the choice to offshore production activities to cheap-labour countries implies a bias in the employment of...

This paper emphasizes the role of labour demand as a determinant of working skill formation. In particular, we study the relationship between techno-organizational innovation and skill formation from a labour demand perspective. In this respect, we investigate if activities aimed at increasing...

By exploiting a new rich firm-level dataset, this paper investigates the decision to subcontract production activities (outsourcing) with respect to vertically integrate them. In particular, we aim at identifying the main factors underlying the decision to either fully or partially decentralise...