New Economic Geography (NEG) models are difficult to confront with the data, since "on the one hand, they generally emphasise the unleashing of agglomeration forces after trade liberalisation, but on the other hand, they also accomodate multiple equilibria and non-monotonicity" (Brülhart,...

The paper aims at examining the drivers of the adoption of the Internet banking, in order to understand its role with respect to the traditional banking activity and to offer a comprehensive picture of the diffusion of such a technology within the sector. In doing so, it analyses the role of...

Home country effects of domestic firms investing abroad have been a highly debated issue. Overall, the results of a number of empirical studies seem not to support the fear that MNEs are exporting domestic production and/or jobs; however the issue should be examined more deeply. In particular,...

We argue that, in the presence of asymmetric countries, a trade agreement that conforms to GATT’s reciprocity rule allows the (stronger) less trade dependent country to improve its welfare relative to both the free trade and the trade war. Conversely, the (weaker) more trade dependent country...

University-industry knowledge transfer is nowadays a very fashionable research subject, both in economics, and in management and policy studies. "Distance" between the two realms of academic and industrial research has been increasingly called in to explain the extent at which the academic...

We argue that, with an elasticity of substitution in consumption greater than one and higher scale economies in the skill-intensive sectors, the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. This implies that trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase...

A well-grounded empirical and theoretical literature shows that local production systems can benefit from external economies generated by a shared ‘industrial atmosphere’. Many scholars would agree that in contexts as industrial districts, clusters and local systems, economic actions are...

In this paper we present a history-friendly model of the changing vertical scope of computer firms during the evolution of the computer and semiconductor industries. The model is “history friendly”, in that it attempts at replicating some basic, stylized qualitative features of the evolution...

The paper investigates the diversified patterns of outsourcing in the Lombardy region and relates them to the probability of introducing product and process innovation. Based on a large firm-level survey, we show that outsourcing processes are strongly regionally embedded and that offshoring is...

Patents for inventions are at the crossroad of law, technology and economics, with the Patent System resting on two fundamental assumptions: one, that technical progress is desirable and that disclosure is preferable to secrecy; two, that a competitive market economy is in the public interest,...