This paper analyses the Italian industrial dynamics, both at the sectorial and at the corporate level. It also examines the evolution of particular firms or projects, determining what different experiences have in common, in order to draw general conclusions on the performances of the Italian...

This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We explore the hypothesis that the...

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This paper explores the complementarity between skills, organizational change and investments in information and communication technology (ICT). Our work contributes to the literature on the effects of ICT by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms...

This paper addresses the organisation and codification of knowledge in the software industry. It analyses various economic incentives to codification, including the need to improve the productivity and quality of software production processes and to access inter-firm collaborations. The paper...

This paper analyses the process of growth and restructuring of 38 large European and US software firms during the period 1984-1992. Since the end of the 1960s, an independent software industry has emerged in the US and in Europe stimulated by technological and institutional change. Particularly,...

This timely and much-needed Handbook reconsiders an old topic from a fresh perspective, raising a number of new, interesting and worthwhile issues in the wake of ten years of globalization. This comprehensive analysis illustrates that old-style industrial policies whereby the government directly...

This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity in European NUTS regions during 1989-1996. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed either on local technological capabilities or on agglomeration economies, we compare three potential explanations of regional advantages:...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the private value of patents and R&D. We analyze an unbalanced sample of firms from five EU countries - France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK in the period 1985-2005. We explore the relationship between firm’s stock market value and...

This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity and employment in European NUTS2 regions. We focus on technological capabilities (proxied by regional patents), agglomeration economies (employment density), and openness, proxied by the number of airplane passengers embarked and...