During the last decades, traditional manufacturing firms in Western economies have undergone a rapid transformation. Two effects of the globalised economy prompting firms to outsource labour intensive production to low wage areas are the increased market size and the competition. Innovation is a...

During the last decades, traditional manufacturing firms in Western economies have undergone a rapid transformation. Two effects of the globalised economy prompting firms to outsource labour intensive production to low wage areas are the increased market size and the competition. Innovation is a...

"Learning-by-doing" is usually identified as a process whereby performance increases with experience in production. The paper investigates different patterns of "learning by doing", studying learning curves at product level. Cost-quantity relationships differ a lot across products belonging to...

We investigate the influence of public R&D subsidies on a firm's likelihood to form technological collaborations. Using signaling theory, we conceptualize the award of a subsidy as a pointing signal (i.e., indicating a quality attribute that distinguishes the signaler from its competitors), and...

This chapter reviews the literature which has developed around the ‘bounds approach’ to market structure over the past fifteen years. The focus of this literature lies in explaining cross-industry differences in concentration, and in the size distribution of firms. One of the main ideas...

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper...