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...

The rise of Fast Ethernet as the dominant standard for high speed connection in the Local Area Network industry is chosen to analyse the relevance of increasing returns and network externalities in determining the speed of standard diffusion. Although it was not the first standard to emerge,...

This paper models the formation of R&D networks in an industry where firms are technologically heterogenous, extending previous work by Goyal and Moraga (2001). While remaining competitors in the market side, firms share their R&D efforts on a pairwise base, to an extent that depends on their...

The geography of innovation traditionally concentrates on localised knowledge spillovers, yet neglects collaboration networks as a means to access knowledge outside the region. Using publication and patent data for 1316 regions in the EU27 plus Norway and Switzerland, we find that both localised...

We investigate the trade-off between FDI and international outsourcing of interme-diate inputs by a producer of a final good. To this extent, we characterize an industry equilibrium where fixed sunk costs exist for the setting up of foreign subsidiaries and the latter are heterogeneous in...

The well-known anomaly of the size structure of Italian manufacturing industry, in which small and micro firms have a disproportionately high share of total employment and value added and large firms a correspondingly low one, has been accentuated in recent years, depressing nominal labour...

The economic literature on technical change has increasingly relied upon patent citation data to measure inter-personal knowledge flows. Many doubts exist on whether patent citations really reflect the designated inventors’ knowledge of both their technical fields, and of the other inventors...

Knowledge production function approaches to estimation of knowledge flows in regions have recently come under attack not to open the ’black box’ of knowledge creation and it has been questioned whether spillovers really are the key determinant of knowledge diffusion rather than market...

The paper presents a dynamic perspective on the landscape of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) developers’ motivations and tries to isolate mechanisms sustaining developers’ contribution over time. The first part of the paper uses data gathered by the empirical studies relative to the...

The paper describes the methodogy used to build a database on academic inventors from France, Italy, and Sweden (1978-2004), which was delivered to the European Commission as part of the KEINS project (Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems), and will provide the...