RISULTATI RICERCA

This paper investigates whether the firms’ productivity may be subject to spillovers from the internationalization behavior of firms within the same local production system. Using a unique dataset for a representative sample of Italian firms we find evidence that the sectorial and geographical agglomeration of exporters improves the labour productivity of domestic non exporting firms. We also show that the potential of productivity spillovers from exporting activities emerge mainly for small firms. Our results are robust to controls for the agglomeration of family firms, dynastic management and human capital of employers, i.e some of these specific features of Italian firms that may affect the capacity of domestic non exporters in receiving the technological and managerial externalities from the proximity with exporters and multinationals.

Greenfield foreign direct investment is commonly regarded as a strategic factor for the economic growth of a country. Unfortunately, Italy has experienced a significant decline over time of greenfield initiatives by multinational enterprises. This paper offers a preliminary descriptive analysis of trends and features of greenfield FDIs and relevant investors in the Italian industry during the 1998-2012 period. The paper benefits from unpublished information provided by the Reprint database developed at the Politecnico di Milano.

This paper explores the influence of a firm’s absorptive capacity on the profitability of one thousand ninety-six Chinese firms. In addition to extending the findings of prior studies on the positive effects of absorptive capacity on a firm’s performance in the context of an emerging economy, empirical results support the main hypothesis of the positive mediating role of absorptive capacity in the relationship between R&D efforts and profitability. These effects, together with the attempt to investigate absorptive capacity outside the usual R&D context using a capability-based operationalization, will lead the discussion towards the role of public policies in enhancing the impact of a firm’s internal R&D efforts through sustaining the development of their "soft" absorptive capacity with complementary investments in compensation, motivation and the development of human resources.

This paper aims at providing a first base of knowledge for the analysis of the strategies adopted by the Italian companies investing in Japan in high technology industries. Despite the Italian industrial system being only marginally present in the Japanese market, in comparison to other European countries, interesting interaction dynamics are detectable between Japanese and Italian industrial companies active in medium and high-tech technology sectors. By adopting the Uppsala model for internationalization and the IMP Group relationship marketing perspective, four case studies of Italian companies who successfully invested in Japan are addressed. Beyond analyzing companies’ activities in Japan and their integration in local supply chains adopting a stage-based approach, the paper offers a view of Japan as a "learning market" for the investing firms, especially in terms of acquired competitive advantages and potential gains to be exploited also in other attractable markets for their business.

The present study analyses the effects of an increase in the share of one-sided cross-ownership in a Cournot duopoly with firm-specific monopolistic unions. Since the cross-participation at ownership level implies a lower degree of competition, then in a duopoly without unions, as expected, consumer surplus and social welfare, despite the increase in the industry profits, are reduced when cross-participation increases. By contrast, when the labour market is unionised, I show the counterintuitive result that, despite the degree of competition is reduced by cross-ownership, both consumer surplus and social welfare increase with the share of cross-participation. This always occurs provided that unions are sufficiently wage-oriented. Moreover, it is shown that the results are also robust to the Bertrand mode of competition. Therefore, the policy implication is that, when wage-interested unions are in existence in oligopoly industries, a rise in cross-participation - i.e. a lower degree of competition - is socially preferred.

This paper investigates which is the most desirable payment schedule, from a social welfare standpoint, for compensating IPR holders for music broadcast by radio stations. A model of a radio station that acts as a monopoly with respect to listeners and sells ads in a competitive market is presented. Two types of fees, ad valorem and per unit, are examined. Exploiting the similarity between taxes and fees, we extend results from taxation theory in two-sided markets to show that the case where only one side (i.e. advertisers) pays, while the other (the listeners) receives the service for free, differs somewhat from the case thus far considered by the literature, in which both sides pay. The results mildly support the prevailing regulatory approach, based on ad valorem fees.