As part of the Lome Convention the STABEX programme is one of the instruments of the European Union's development policy. Its objective is to reduce the instability of the agricultural export earnings of the developing countries which signed the agreement. By working on a commodity-by-commodity...

Recently the focus of R&D impact on productivity moves from internal to external innovation. This paper assesses the link between R&D spillovers and productivity of 1017 Italian manufacturing firms over 1995-2000. Different proxies of R&D spillovers and several specification tests are used to...

This paper analyses the TFP heterogeneity of a sample of manufacturing firms operating in seven EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and UK). TFP data refer to 2008. The empirical setting is based on the multilevel modelling which provides two main results. Firstly, we...

In this study several matching procedures have been used to evaluate the impact of public R&D support received by Italian manufacturing firms over the three-year period 2004-2006. Data are from the Capitalia-UniCredit survey and estimations refer to a sample of 605 treated firms untreated are...

One learns two main lessons from studying the great quantity of banking efficiency literature. These lessons regard the heterogeneity in results and the absence of a comprehensive review aimed at understanding the reasons for this variability. Surprisingly, although this issue is well-known, it...

The aim of this work is to study the efficiency of firms operating in Calabria, a small and economically-lagging Italian region. The analysis is carried out by estimating a stochastic production frontier for an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms which are observed over the 1998-2006 period....

Understanding the impact of instability of export receipts on the economic growth of developing countries has been an important area of research in development economics for a long time. A substantial body of literature has documented a wide range of empirical regularities according to which...

Sectoral and territorial specificities affect the firm’s capabilities of being productive. While there is a wide consensus on this, a quantitative measure of the these effects has been lacking. To this end, we combine a dataset of Italian firms with some meso regional and sectoral variables...

This study evaluates the cost and the profit efficiency of Italian banking sector over the period 2006-2011. Translog stochastic frontiers are used for this purpose. Following the intermediation approach, efficiency scores are computed from estimating a model with three inputs and three outputs....