Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of a prolonged economic recession on the entrepreneurial intentions of young people (university students) distinguishing between propensity to start a new business (i.e. degree of interest in entrepreneurship) and perceived...

This paper presents one of the first studies on the entrepreneurial orientation of Italian university students. For a large sample of students from the University of Parma (Italy), we estimate the sources of entrepreneurial intent, distinguishing between the propensity to start a new business...

The positive impact of intangible assets on several measures of economic performance is well documented in the literature. Less clear is what initially leads firms to invest in intangible assets. The latter is particularly important because, at least for the Italian manufacturing sector, firms...

This work offers an interpretation of the role that multifunctionality plays in the policies that sustain rural development. Assuming as a reference the livelihood approach, we analyse multifunctionality within a framework which differs from the usual Wto negotiations. We reappraise its...

Control is becoming increasingly frequent in cyberspace, to an extent that puts into question the latter’s traditional openness. In order to investigate the origins and effects of such change the paper formally model the historical evolution of digital control. In the model, the economy-wide...

The organization of information production is undergoing a deep transformation. Alongside media corporations, which have been for long time the predominant institutions of information production, new organizational forms have emerged, e.g. free software communities, open-content on-line wikis,...

Why do open- and closed-source productions co-exist? To address this question, the paper studies the viability of distinct systems for software development. The model shows that: (a) for low design costs of modularity, both open- and closed-source productions are viable systems; (b)...

- In biology, the evolution of species is influenced by two types of complementarities. One type is mostly related to the synergies among and within organisms, while the other is the outcome of conflicts among different species and among members of the same species. In both conflictual and...