The paper aims at explaining the changes in how economic actors and their organizations acquire and coordinate innovative and productive capabilities. Through the illustrative evidence of organizational change occurred in the automobile industry in the area of Turin over the last 50 years, the...

Sen’s capability approach distinguishes between what people are free to do and to be (their ‘capabilities’) and what they do and who they are (their ‘functionings’). In the capability approach,individuals’ well-being is evaluated not only in terms of achieved functionings, but also...

This paper investigates the gender and ethnic wage differentials for female Immigrants, applying the Oaxaca ecomposition to estimate the level of discrimination. The gender pay gap is quite small (7.42%), but it's not explained by observable differences, whilst the ethnic wage gap is larger...

Agent-based (AB) models are considered a promising tool for macroeconomic analysis. However, until estimation of AB models become a common practice, they will not get to the center stage of macroeconomics. Two diculties arise in the estimation of AB models: (i) the criterion function has no...

The European Regulation 1606/2002 has required European firms listed on the European stock markets to prepare, starting from 2005, their consolidated financial statements according to the international accounting standards IAS/IFRS. The purpose of such a regulation is to ensure a high degree of...

Cultural policy often implies the transfer of public resources to private cultura l institutions. In this contribution we focus on the determinants of a government’s choice between cultural transfers and in-house cultural production. We argue that in the cultural field transfers may be seen as...

Using a sample of Italian firms, I investigate whet her separate financial statements are useful to capital market investors and IFRS are more value-relevant than domestic GAAP. I find significant differences in value-relevance between Italian GAAP and IFRS, with IFRS being more informative than...

In the last decades, industrial design has been increasingly recognized as a sector combining elements of both artistic creativity and economic innovation. Using a unique dataset encompassing information on 326 top designers, 242 firms and 935 products from 1913 to 2000, we investigate the main...

Technological congruence is defined by the matching between the relative size of outputs’ elasticity with the relative abundance and cost of inputs in local factor markets. With given total costs, output is larger the larger is the output elasticity of the cheapest input. Technological...