We explore the extent to which the current technological trend, dubbed Industry 4.0, might increase forms of control inside organisations, by focussing on pivotal firms in the so-called Italian Motor Valley currently embracing its adoption. We find that Industry 4.0 technologies open up great...

This paper aims at investigating the evolution of the employment and wage structure of Italian manufacturing firms in the early 2000s. The work analyzes whether skills and wage movements have been taken place between or within sectors, and within sector, between or within firms. We show that...

Recent empirical analyses on different datasets have revealed a common exponential behaviour in the shape of the probability density of the corporate growth rates. We briefly review these analyses and present new evidence on this topic based on corporate data from Italian Manufacturing Industry....

We present empirical evidence on diversification patterns in Italian manufacturing firms and detect a robust relationship between firm size and diversification levels, with an elasticity of diversification that does not depend on firm size and is well below unity. Diversification does not lead...

In this work we explore some basic properties of the size distributions of firms and of their growth processes both at aggregate and disaggregate levels. First, we investigate which properties of firm's size distributions and growth dynamics are robust under disaggregation. Second, at a...

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm defaults. Our analysis is not limited to publicly traded companies but extends to a large sample of limited liability firms. We consider size, growth, profitability and productivity together with a...

Using firm level data this study investigates the relation between export activity and firm’s profitability. The paper shows that, contrary to other performance indicators such as productivity, exporting activity is not systematically associated to higher firm’s profitability. This is shown...

This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...

Italy ranked last in terms of manufacturing productivity growth according to OECD estimates over the last decade with a flat, if not declining, trend. In this work we investigate the underlying firm-level dynamics of enterprises on the grounds of a database developed by the Italian Statistical...

This paper presents a multidimensional empirical analysis of firm growth. Exploiting census data on Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to analyze the co-evolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth. Our main...