The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...

This paper examines the determinants of international competitiveness at the level of sectors and firms. First, we address the relation between cost-related and technological competition in a sample of fifteen OECD countries. Results suggest that the countries' sectoral market shares are indeed...

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 article explores the dynamics of market selection by investigating of the relationships linking productivity, profitability, investment and growth, based on China's manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998 - 2007. First, we find that productivity variations, rather than...

In this work we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification, if any, across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge, proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present. Putting it more emphatically we investigate the relationship between "what a...

In this work, inspired by Winter (2006), in fact of vintage 1968, we discuss the relation between three different levels of analysis of technologies, namely as (i) bodies of problem-solving knowledge, (ii) organizational procedures, and (iii) input-output relations. We begin by arguing that the...

This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago in the limits to growthʺ discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the...

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration...

"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...

In this article we propose a new methodology for computing the aggregate productivity of an industry, its variations and decompositions of the latter into changes of individual productivities (within effect) and changes in industry composition (between effect). Current aggregate measures rely on...