A government that wants to increase welfare by subsidizing either an industry’s sales or process innovations or both has to account for possible changes of production, when firms can foresee the government’s actions. In an optimal control framework welfare can be increased by subsidizing...

The paper shows that in the presence of network externalities, consumers adopt conventional technologies too early; the waiting option for a newly emerging technology is not exercised enough.

Externalities have for a long time been perceived as awkward cases that are alien to well-structured economic analyses. During recent decades ideas inherited from Marshall and others have regained interest in the analysis of specialisation and trade, urban formation and growth as well as...

Entry of large (“big-box”) stores along with a drastic fall in the total number of stores is a striking trend in retail markets. In this paper we provide a dynamic structural model, controlling for unobserved prices and local market characteristics, to estimate total factor productivity in...

Using the framework provided by the asymmetric-information and real-options theories, we examine the impact of uncertainty on firms’ decisions and market outcomes. We construct alternative measures of uncertainty based on survey of professional forecasters and our estimation of...

This paper aims at measuring the impact of competition on productivity growth of the Tunisian manufacturing sector at the firm level. To investi-gate the impact of competition on productivity we use two procedures. The first one is a two-step procedure; the second one is a one step procedure. We...

This paper shows that the R&D intensity of an industry plays an important role in determining international trade patterns via its e¤ect on scale economies. I first develop a model of trade with heterogeneous firms where firms compete with each other by spending on fixed product development...

We present a model of endogenous formation of R&D agreements among firms in which also the timing of R&D investment is made endogenous. The purpose is to bridge two usually separate streams of literature, the noncooperative formation of R&D alliances and the endogenous timing literature. Our...

This paper aims at understanding the role of the particular structure of the Italian manufacturing industry in affecting the in- vestments in R&D. Although it is well known that the Italian in­ dustry is characterised by a high weight of small enterprises and in­dustrial sectors which...

Economists have shown that large and persistent differences in productivity levels across businesses are ubiquitous. This finding has shaped research agendas in a number of fields, including (but not limited to) macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor, and trade. This paper surveys and...