In recent decades firms have intensified the exploration of external sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that affect the importance of academic knowledge for firms’ innovative activities. An integrated approach...

In recent decades firms have stepped up cooperation in R&D to improve their innovation capability by exploiting the external knowledge. Using data from the Community Innovation Survey, this paper analyzes the effect of cooperation on the propensity to innovate of Italian firms. Overall, the main...

This paper analyses the role of venture capitalists in Italian Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Between 1999 and 2012 venture capital backed IPOs are on average less underpriced than non-venture backed IPOs. By using both a matching and a regression-based approach to account for the non-random...

The purpose of this paper is to show that in the period after Italian Unification in 1861 two very important criminal phenomena in southern Italy, brigandage and organised crime, became rooted in the structure of rural and land organisation. We use econometrics to show that brigandage intensity...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand-pull and technology-push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector. The empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database (BioPat) containing patents in the field of biofuels selected...

This paper investigates the role of venture capitalists in Italian Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Between 1999 and 2012, venture capital (VC) backed IPOs are on average less underpriced than non-VC-backed IPOs. By using both matching methods and a regression-based approach to account for the...

This paper aims to identify the factors that result in cooperation in R&D in high-tech industrial sectors. Our research focused on Italian technological districts created under a specific public policy to promote innovation and regional economic development. The most interesting results concern...

This paper explores the drivers of inter-firm R&D collaborations in a particular type of innovation network, the technological districts created in Italy under a specific public policy to promote innovation. The empirical analysis used an original database containing information on research...

Firm innovation capacity depends not only on internal capabilities, but also on external expertise and knowledge acquired through cooperation. This paper analyzes direct and indirect effect of R&D cooperation on the innovation of Italian firms. Using a multivariate probit model to account for...

We provide international evidence on the relationship between the extent of underpricing related to initial public offerings (IPOs) and the distance of the issuing firm from the financial centre of a country: for France, Germany and Italy, the higher the distance, the higher the level of...