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...

Aim of this article is to present an overview of the main economic literature focusing on the issue of how technology adoption and the accumulation of technical skills by firms affects the aggregate performance of economic systems. Since the analysis is labour‐demand oriented, a...

This positional contribution has a twofold aim: the first is to explore the recent empirical literature developed around the issue of how the adoption of new technologies within the firm has changed the skill requirements of occupations; the second is to conjecture on the relationship, and on...

Thanks to the high availability of data, professional sport represents a unique laboratory in order to test labour market theories and predictions. In particular, one of the most important propositions concerns the role that human capital plays in shaping the life-cycle earnings patterns of...

This work explores the effects of production offshoring on the workforce skill composition of manufacturing firms. Its aim is to assess if the firms' strategy to offshore production activities determines a bias in the in-house employment of labor in favour of high-skilled workers. Using three...

Basing on a job competition approach, in this paper we provide a labour demand-oriented measure of human capital as defined by the amount of specific skills a firm generates through work-based training (WBT) activities. By merging three rich firm-level datasets, we estimate the impact of a set...

This work explores the effects of cross-border relocation of production on the skill composition of Italian manufacturing firms. Its aim is to assess if the firms’ strategy to offshore production activities towards cheap labor countries determines a bias in the relative employment of skilled...

Aim of this paper is to study whether and how the firm’s decision to outsource production activities affects its technological performance. In particular, we look at how the alignment between the firm’s governance strategy and the underlying attributes of the transactions affects the capacity...

Aim of this paper is to explore the main drivers of outsourcing of knowledge intensive business services by Italian manufacturing firms. While anecdotal and empirical evidence has emphasized labour cost and scale economies as behind firms’ choices to outsource production or service activities,...

The aim of this paper is to provide firm-level evidence on the short-run link between outsourcing and labor productivity using an original dataset of Italian manufacturing firms, and applying a two-stage probit least squares estimator. We find a positive effect on productivity from outsourcing...