The paper analyzes the impact of localization, urbanization and competition on firm-level TFP, using a large sample of Italian firm-level data from 1999 to 2007. In particular, the paper explores the nonlinearities of such effects, accounting for the possible presence of critical masses and/or...

We investigate how the country’s absorptive capacity and relative backwardness affect the impact of international R&D spillovers on domestic Total Factor Productivity (TFP). To account for nonlinearities, we adopt a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) approach, where the country’s...