This paper analyses the empirical literature which tests the hypothesis that imports (or potential imports) may increase domestic competition. Most of studies analysed, including those conducted on industrialised countries and more recent contributions on less developed countries, confirm the...

Theoretical literature suggests that firms’ financial structure affects their real decisions because of capital markets imperfections. Several empirical studies have been conducted to test this hypothesis. This survey illustrates the main results of this literature focusing on the effects of...

In this paper we look at both the theoretical and empirical behavior of price-cost margins when capital market imperfections affect firms’ markup policies. We present a model of a firm operating in an industry with differentiated products and facing imperfect markets for financing operations....

In this paper we estimate a variable cost function to analyze cost economies and technical change in the English water only sector over the 1995-2005 period. We jointly model the impact on costs of output, customer numbers and area size which allows us to consider both the vertical and...

The aim of this study is to discuss the empirical literature which analyzes the relationship between firms heterogeneity and export activity on Italian manufacturing firm level data. We first present a short review of the main empirical techniques adopted in the applied literature and we briefly...

This paper sheds additional light on the relationship between firm level innovative capacity and export intensity. By drawing from the recent literature on exporters' heterogeneity, we apply quantile regression techniques to a sample of Italian firms in order to verify whether the effect of...

Bottazzi and Peri (2007) show that the existence of a cointegrating relationship between the domestic stock of knowledge, domestic R&D and the international knowledge stock can be interpreted as evidence supporting the semi-endogenous growth models versus the endogenous growth ones. We replicate...

This paper analyses the impact of port activities on local development for a sample of 621 TL-3 regions located in thirteen European countries and observed over the period 1998–2009. Using a spatial panel econometric framework which controls for spatial fixed effects, the paper provides an...

In this study we analyze the evolution of operating cost inefficiency for the English and Welsh water industry over the period 1995-2001 by estimating an heteroskedastic stochastic variable cost frontier. The main aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the industry cost...