The wide diffusion of open source software (OSS) is driving discussion among scholars on a set of issues, including its adoption by public administrations (PA). Previous works only discussed one or a few factors that drive the decision to adopt OSS and did not addressed the potential benefits in...

The paper analyzes how (production and financial) inter-firm networks can affect firms' default probabilities and observed default rates: an issue the recent crisis has brought to the front of the debate. A simple theoretical model of shock transfer is built up to investigate some stylized facts...

Recent developments in the new international trade theory stressed the relationship between firm heterogeneity and internationalization performance. The key prediction of these models is that firms with different levels of productivity - the main source of firm heterogeneity - will generally...

This work provides a deeper account of an increasing phenomenon characterising the European Union in recent years, i.e. software patenting. To this purpose we present a novel database of software patents providing a reliability check. According to that, more than 30 000 software patents have...

The paper investigates the effect of spatial agglomeration on firm exit. In particular, the role of specialization and local variety in production is addressed. The extent to which industrial clusters can be actually retained industrial districts is also considered. Empirical evidence is...

The literature on innovation studies has extensively examined the main drivers of innovation activity, while putting less attention on factors that are crucial in order to foster competition dynamics, as well as to attenuate systemic failures to innovation. This paper aims to filling this gap by...

Although many recent contributions have directly analysed the different types of failures that might affect the systems of innovation it is still quite unclear how the system-failures framework can be applied at the regional level. This paper tries to fill this gap and in particular it...

The paper aims at investigating the role that one country's position in the international trade network has in attracting knowledge and technology flows to it. By referring to "indirect" Research and Development (R&D) spillovers, we argue that not only is this position responsible for the number...

Transformation has been put in motion by a variety of both endogenous and exogenous forces. Although not any process was under the control of those countries, their choice of goals and instruments was anyway particularly great, at least theoretically. However, transformation was implemented as a...

In this work we explore how the international outsourcing of production (offshoring) impacts the skill composition of Italian manufacturing firms. In particular, our aim is to assess if the choice to offshore production activities to cheap-labour countries implies a bias in the employment of...