Economic interdependence and structural change: an investigation on business cycle transmission

Insomma, non si può osservare una onda senza tenere conto degli aspetti complessi che concorrono a formarla e di quelli altrettanto complessi cui essa dà luogo (I. Calvino, Palomar).     

What do firms know? What do they produce? A new look at the relationship between patenting profiles and patterns of product diversification

In this work, we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification, if any, across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge, proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present. Putting it more emphatically, we investigate the relationship between “what a firm does” and “what a firm knows.” Using a newly developed dataset matching information on patents and products at the firm level, we provide evidence concerning firms’ technological and product scope, their relationships, the size-scaling and coherence properties of diversification itself. Our analysis shows that typically firms are much more diversified in terms of products than in terms of technologies, with their main products more related to the exploitation of their innovative knowledge. The scaling properties show that the number of products and technologies increases log-linearly with firm size. And the directions of diversification themselves display coherence between neighboring activities also at relatively high degrees of diversification. These findings are well in tune with a capability-based theory of the firm.     

Firm Complexity and Capital Structure: Evidence from Italian Diversified Firms

This paper examines the links between product diversification, international diversification and capital structure for a panel of medium and large Italian firms. The results indicate that the interaction between these two dimensions of diversification strategy has a negative and significant impact on leverage. Furthermore, debt maturity analysis reveals that firms pursuing a simultaneous dual diversification strategy have, in particular, lower long‐term debt ratios. Our findings support the hypothesis that the complexity that comes from diversification reduces debt levels. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dynamic impact of immigration on natives' labor market outcomes: Evidence from Israel

This paper studies the short and medium run impact of highly skilled immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel on natives' wages and employment. If immigrants are relatively good substitutes for native workers, the impact of immigration will be largest immediately upon the immigrants' arrival, and may become smaller as the labor market adjusts to the supply shock. Conversely, if immigrants upon arrival are poor substitutes for natives, the initial effect of immigration is small, and increases over time as immigrants acquire local labor market skills and compete with native workers. We empirically examine these alternative hypotheses using data from Israel between 1989 and 1999.We find that wages of both men and women are negatively correlated with the fraction of immigrants with little local experience in a labor market segment. A 10 percent increase in the share of immigrants lowers natives' wages in the short run by 1–3 percent, but this effect dissolves after 4–7 years. This result is robust to a variety of different segmentations of the labor market, to the inclusion of cohort effects, and to different dynamic structures in the residual term of the wage equation. On the other hand, we do not find any effect of immigration on employment, neither in the short nor in the medium run.     

Innovation as a nonlinear process,the scientometric perspective,and the specification of an ‘innovation opportunities explorer’

The process of innovation follows nonlinear patterns across the domains of science, technology, and the economy. Novel bibliometric mapping techniques can be used to investigate and represent distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the innovation process (e.g. ‘demand’ and ‘supply’) as well as the interactions among these perspectives using animations. In a map, the different perspectives can be represented as ‘continents’ of data related to varying extents over time. For example, the different branches of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the Medline database provide sources of such perspectives (e.g. ‘Diseases’ vs ‘Drugs and Chemicals’). The multiple-perspective approach enables us to reconstruct facets of the dynamics of innovation, in terms of selection mechanisms shaping localisable trajectories and/or resulting in more globalised regimes. By expanding the data with patents and scholarly publications, we demonstrate the use of this multi-perspective approach in the case of RNA Interference (RNAi). The possibility to develop an ‘Innovation Opportunities Explorer’ is specified.     

Conception and test of a comprehensive model of international strategy for retail companies

Abstract

This article proposes a model of international strategy of retail companies. It has been developed and tested by studying the international activities, both successful and unsuccessful, of 37 international companies for more than a decade. It defines the most important components of a successful strategy and, for each component, it evaluates the importance of this variable in connection with the others. The model proposed is able not only to explain the internationalization process of many important companies during the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, but also puts forward to the managerial sector the strategic variables for both the companies that have already started an internationalization process and those that wish to begin it.