The claim of the paper is that industrial clusters need to be studied from a dynamic perspective. The complexity of cluster formation may be ascribed to its multi-dimensional and multidisciplinary character. The former refers to the co-involvement of individuals’ decisions, firms’ activities...

This paper examines how the nature of the technological regime governing innovative activities and the structure of demand interact in determining market structure, with specific reference to the pharmaceutical industry. The key question concerns the observation that - despite high degrees of...

The aim of this paper is to extend the theoretical literature on knowledge and network structure by considering explicitly the choice to use the social network as a learning mechanism. In the model, we consider a set of actors that creates and diffuses knowledge. They are located on a lattice...

The paper provides a reassessment of arguments and tests in support of the existence and magnitude of localized knowledge spillovers proposed by Jaffe, Trajtenberg and Henderson (1993). We use information in patents to control for the mobility of inventors across companies and space, as well as...

Cohesion policy has developed from a minor concern to one of the most important pursuits of the European Union. It amounts to about 35% of the EU budget, making it the second largest budget item. A reform of the EU’s structural policies is now unavoidable because of i) the performance of...

The lack of firm-level data on innovative activities has always constrained the development of empirical studies on innovation. More recently, the availability of large datasets on indicators, such as R&D expenditures and patents, has relaxed these constrains and spurred the growth of a new wave...

Authorship and inventorship are attribution rights that contribute to the reputation of individual scientists, but have to be distributed across several individuals, due to the importance of teamwork in both science and technology. For academic teams that both publish and patent their research...

This paper studies the e¤ects of service offshoring on the skill composition of labor demand in Western Europe, using comparable data for nine economies during the 1990s. A short-run translog cost function allows derivation of demand elasticities for three labor inputs. Potential endogeneity...

Knowledge transfer issues are of great interest in researchers and policy makers agenda because of its implications in terms of innovation diffusion and economic welfare. Among the others, workers’ mobility, namely highly skilled ones, is considered as one of the most influential channels for...

The Italian industrial sector is characterized by a number of peculiarities compared to other advanced countries. One of these is the small average size of its firms. This particular model of organization of production, based on the small dimension and often on informal relationships within and...