We argue that the use of online networks may threaten subjective well-being in several ways, due to the inherent attributes of Internet-mediated interaction and through its effects on social trust and sociability. We test our hypotheses on a representative sample of the Italian population. We...

The concepts of absorptive capacity and innovative capability have been introduced to describe abilities of a country to imitate and, accordingly, to create more advanced technologies. In this paper we suggest new indicators of these two abilities. To calculate them, we develop an endogenous...

Innovation has become a central theme and challenge in the literature of entrepreneurship, SMEs management, and strategic knowledge management and in the literature of organizational learning. Innovation needs a business environment that is conducive to long-term investments in new business...

The idea of smart specialisation has gained high prominence in the discourse about EU regional policy. In the coming program period from 2014 to 2020 it is expected to be a major pillar of EU structural funds. The notion of smart specialisation incorporates some basic principles of evolutionary...

The aim of this work is to study the efficiency of firms operating in Calabria, a small and economically-lagging Italian region. The analysis is carried out by estimating a stochastic production frontier for an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms which are observed over the 1998-2006 period....

This paper asks if – and how – the global financial crisis of 2008/09 has affected overseas R&D activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Based on a data set of OECD countries, we find that the share of MNEs on total business R&D expenditure decreased for the first time since 2001 in...

The celebrated Uzawa(1961) theorem holds that，on the steady-growth path of neoclassical growth model，technological progress must be purely labor-augmenting rather than capital-augmenting，except the special case where the production function takes the form of Cobb-Douglas. With an augmented...

Economic literature describes drastic and non-drastic innovations as sources of marginal cost reduction. The difference is that non-drastic innovations are unable to reduce the new marginal cost in order to ensure that the innovator is able to set monopoly price lower than the previous marginal...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the Italian total factor productivity slowdown. The analysis focusses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the TFP dynamics. This analysis can not be done with the Cobb-Douglas technology but requires the employ of a...

This is a survey of some ideas relating to the theory of economic growth and how economic growth impacts the natural world.