Modularity has gained recently a growing attention in the management literature as a key to explain the contemporary trends of industrial dynamics, according to which external «market-based» economies have become predominant over internal «bureaucracy-based» economies. Nowadays global...

This paper studies imports of quality products. The issue is more and more relevant because of the strong evidence of such differentiation in international trade. We first derive individual demand, then we aggregate without using the representative consumer hypothesis. We find that quality...

A great amount of recent studies dealing with industrial clustering suggests that the innovative performance of industrial districts is strictly linked with their ability to absorb external knowledge. This paper aims at identifying and analysing the main actors involved in this process. We...

We study the effects of trade integration on the regional coevolution of income, migrations and unemployment in a dynamic core-periphery model with limited labor mobility and frictions in the job matching process. Our model can help explain a recently documented empirical puzzle, i.e., the...

Innovation is widely acknowledged as one of the main forces driving economic growth. However, despite our significant knowledge of the technological determinants of innovation processes, an adequate understanding of demand side factors is still lacking. This paper aims to survey the literature...

The idea that innovation leads to positive economic performance has become a sort of truism in recent years. However, empirical evidence showing that innovating organizations and countries outperform non-innovating ones remains scant and scattered. In many ways, the jury is still out. First of...

We investigate the relationship between product innovation and firm survival for a sample of 121 firms in a high-tech industry. We find that location near the technological frontier is an important determinant of fim survival. Firms located near the frontier are also more likely to be acquired...

Industrial classifications offer arguably poor schemes for classifying innovative activity. Moreover, a single measure incorporating technological relatedness between the inherent classes, captures the neglected issue of Jacobs (1969) and Marshall (1920), that the degree of relatedness of...

Widespread adoption of a new capital-embodied technology often requires a continuous flow of incremental innovations, aimed at making renting the new machine a viable alternative to buying it, or at dividing it up in modular elements, and possibly allowing for product range extension....

The claim of the paper is that industrial clusters need to be studied from a dynamic perspective. The complexity of cluster formation may be ascribed to its multi-dimensional and multidisciplinary character. The former refers to the co-involvement of individuals’ decisions, firms’ activities...