The community structure of two real-world financial networks, namely the board network and the ownership network of the firms of the Italian Stock Exchange, is analyzed by means of the maximum modularity approach. The main result is that both networks exhibit a strong community structure and,...

A relevant share of the theoretical and empirical analysis on economic growth has been devoted to finding a specific role for international trade in reinforcing countries' growth rates. Not as much attention has been dedicated to the role of sectoral composition of export in influencing the...

<div><div>In this paper we look at the role of export composition in the growth process, considering how increased similarity in trade structure among countries can induce catching-up in income levels. We apply our analysis to the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) using the EU as a benchmark....</div></div>

The Italian industrial sector is characterized by a number of peculiarities compared to other advanced countries. One of these is the small average size of its firms. This particular model of organization of production, based on the small dimension and often on informal relationships within and...

In traditional trade models, whether based on technological differences or on relative factor endowments, merchandise composition and directions of trade are derived from closed-economy, pre-trade conditions. But nowadays one the basic assumptions of traditional trade models, i.e. that...

In this paper we explore the BACI-CEPII database using Network Analysis. Starting from the visualization of the World Trade Network, we then define and describe the topology of the network, both in its binary version and in its weighted version, calculating and discussing some of the commonly...

In this paper, the authors start from the observation of two apparently contradictory trends: the increasing regionalization of trade and the proliferation of regional trade agreements, on the one hand, and the increase of the average number of trading partners of each country and of the trading...

This paper studies how the structure of the International Trade Network (ITN) changes in geographical space and along time. We employ geographical distance between countries in the world to filter the links in the ITN, building a sequence of sub-networks, each one featuring trade links occurring...

In this paper, we assess the extent of offshoring in the Italian manufacturing industries, and we study how this phenomenon is affecting the skill composition of employment. Measuring offshoring using the import-use matrices of input-output tables, firstly we estimate the impact of offshoring on...