Italy ranked last in terms of manufacturing productivity growth according to OECD estimates over the last decade with a flat, if not declining, trend. In this work we investigate the underlying firm-level dynamics of enterprises on the grounds of a database developed by the Italian Statistical...

This work brings together two distinct pieces of evidence concerning, at the macro level, international distributions of incomes and their dynamics, and, at the micro level, the size distributions of firms and the properties of their growth rates. First, our empirical analysis provides a new...

In this work we analyze the characteristics and dynamics of organizations wherein members diverge in terms of capabilities and visions they hold, and interests which they pursue. How does society put together such distributed and possibly coflicting knowledge? The question is Hayekian in its...

The capability-based view of the firm is based on the assumption that firms know how to do things. Assuming the existence of a thing called 'organizational knowledge', in the first part of the paper we identify its main building blocks and we provide a description of its inner structure. This...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

This paper discusses the link between patterns of technological change and economic development taking an evolutionary perspective. We argue that the modes and timing of such coupled dynamics are deeply influenced by the emergence of new techno-economic paradigms or regimes. ICT-based...

This paper presents a critical overview of some recent attempts at building formal models of organizations as information-processing and problem-solving entities. We distinguish between two classes of models according to two distinct objects of analysis. The first class includes models mainly...

This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago in the limits to growth discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the...