Teses / dissertações sobre o tema "A.P. Møller (Firm)"

For a long time economic theory argued that the level of economic development depends on the allocation of production factors both between and within economies. However, it is rarely underlined that allocation depends on organizational decisions and management, especially on organizational decisions within and across firms. Understanding such decisions through both empirical studies and theory is highly important. It may enable us to understand the microeconomic roots of macroeconomic patterns. This thesis conducts at the empirical analysis of organizational decisions that may potentially influence aggregate performance. It shows connection of the organizational decisions with both the economic environment and firm characteristics. The focus is on transition countries, after the massive privatization period. The reasons are threefold: i) essential differences that emerged in performances of countries with similar heritages and starting points ii) the need to quantify the impact of “complementary†reforms after privatization iii) the mis-match between the expectations and the results of building a market-oriented environment. Following a first chapter overviewing the economic context, theoretical positioning and empirical framework, the thesis contains four studies. The first two studies (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) are devoted to firm boundaries decisions as one of the key organizational decisions. By using the cross-section data of the EBRD-World Bank Business Environment Enterprise Survey (BEEPS III) and utilizing the predictions of Antràs and Helpman's global sourcing modelling, I study the industry-level incidence of integration and firm-level decisions to redefine firm boundaries. Both studies highlight the importance of both technological and institutional factors. Moreover, the second study presents the firm-level perspective and highlights the importance of firm propensity to change. The third study (Chapter 4) is focused on changes of internal firm organization and their connection with international trade liberalization. It provides preliminary answers to the following questions: (i) what drives flattening decisions, and (ii) whether flatter structures may be associated with a higher degree of control. By using the Management, Organization and Innovation (MOI) Survey, this study provides new evidence on the positive connection between increased competition from imports and firm flattening in transition countries. It also suggests that flattening may have more centralization features than is usually assumed. The fourth study (Chapter 5) explores the connection between management quality and corruption. By using the BEEPS V cross-section data, I underline the general negative connection between the management quality and different kinds of corruption over the period 2011-2014. However, the results also indicate the existence of idiosyncratic links between corruption and quality of management in some transition countries. As a result, the thesis contributes to the literature by advancing the state-of-the-art knowledge on firm organization in transition countries over the period 2005-2014. First, it identifies significant differences between country groups, namely EU and non-EU transition countries. The differences are persistent and characteristic for all the types of organizational change considered in the thesis, as well as the link between management and corruption. In particular, in non EU-transition countries, these differences are due to country-level and firm-level idiosyncrasy. Second, the thesis evidences that, regardless of numerous reforms of the business environment, firms in transition countries are rarely subject to organizational changes. However, a small number of firms subject to organizational changes significantly out-perform their counterparts. Consequently, it is important to understand what features of the economic environment or characteristics of firms prevent such efficiency-enhancing changes. Third, the thesis shows that firms in transition countries differ in their internal organizational structures, which they adjust to changes in product market competition. However, the intensity of these adjustments is heterogeneous across countries and industries. Fourth, a negative connection between management quality and corruption indicates that further simplification of business regulations and anti-corruption measures would unquestionably enhance the quality of management in EU transition countries both at the firm and at the country level. However, similar measures are not equally efficient for non-EU transition countries, because the link is idiosyncratic in these countries at the firm level. This thesis provides new evidence on the significant role of contractual links, technology complexity, product market competition and corruption in explaining the gap between micro-behavior and macro-objectives. However, the results put forward the need for i) a bottom-up approach, with firm behavior being analyzed and considered as an underlying force of aggregate and international performance, and ii) theories that account for firm organizational adjustments, because such adjustments may significantly alter our understanding of international trade gains and the channels through which efficiency enhancing reforms act and affect industrial reorganization.

For a long time economic theory argued that the level of economic development depends on the allocation of production factors both between and within economies. However, it is rarely underlined that allocation depends on organizational decisions and management, especially on organizational decisions within and across firms. Understanding such decisions through both empirical studies and theory is highly important. It may enable us to understand the microeconomic roots of macroeconomic patterns. This thesis conducts at the empirical analysis of organizational decisions that may potentially influence aggregate performance. It shows connection of the organizational decisions with both the economic environment and firm characteristics. The focus is on transition countries, after the massive privatization period. The reasons are threefold: i) essential differences that emerged in performances of countries with similar heritages and starting points ii) the need to quantify the impact of “complementary” reforms after privatization iii) the mis-match between the expectations and the results of building a market-oriented environment. Following a first chapter overviewing the economic context, theoretical positioning and empirical framework, the thesis contains four studies. The first two studies (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) are devoted to firm boundaries decisions as one of the key organizational decisions. By using the cross-section data of the EBRD-World Bank Business Environment Enterprise Survey (BEEPS III) and utilizing the predictions of Antràs and Helpman's global sourcing modelling, I study the industry-level incidence of integration and firm-level decisions to redefine firm boundaries. Both studies highlight the importance of both technological and institutional factors. Moreover, the second study presents the firm-level perspective and highlights the importance of firm propensity to change. The third study (Chapter 4) is focused on changes of internal firm organization and their connection with international trade liberalization. It provides preliminary answers to the following questions: (i) what drives flattening decisions, and (ii) whether flatter structures may be associated with a higher degree of control. By using the Management, Organization and Innovation (MOI) Survey, this study provides new evidence on the positive connection between increased competition from imports and firm flattening in transition countries. It also suggests that flattening may have more centralization features than is usually assumed. The fourth study (Chapter 5) explores the connection between management quality and corruption. By using the BEEPS V cross-section data, I underline the general negative connection between the management quality and different kinds of corruption over the period 2011-2014. However, the results also indicate the existence of idiosyncratic links between corruption and quality of management in some transition countries. As a result, the thesis contributes to the literature by advancing the state-of-the-art knowledge on firm organization in transition countries over the period 2005-2014. First, it identifies significant differences between country groups, namely EU and non-EU transition countries. The differences are persistent and characteristic for all the types of organizational change considered in the thesis, as well as the link between management and corruption. In particular, in non EU-transition countries, these differences are due to country-level and firm-level idiosyncrasy. Second, the thesis evidences that, regardless of numerous reforms of the business environment, firms in transition countries are rarely subject to organizational changes. However, a small number of firms subject to organizational changes significantly out-perform their counterparts. Consequently, it is important to understand what features of the economic environment or characteristics of firms prevent such efficiency-enhancing changes. Third, the thesis shows that firms in transition countries differ in their internal organizational structures, which they adjust to changes in product market competition. However, the intensity of these adjustments is heterogeneous across countries and industries. Fourth, a negative connection between management quality and corruption indicates that further simplification of business regulations and anti-corruption measures would unquestionably enhance the quality of management in EU transition countries both at the firm and at the country level. However, similar measures are not equally efficient for non-EU transition countries, because the link is idiosyncratic in these countries at the firm level. This thesis provides new evidence on the significant role of contractual links, technology complexity, product market competition and corruption in explaining the gap between micro-behavior and macro-objectives. However, the results put forward the need for i) a bottom-up approach, with firm behavior being analyzed and considered as an underlying force of aggregate and international performance, and ii) theories that account for firm organizational adjustments, because such adjustments may significantly alter our understanding of international trade gains and the channels through which efficiency enhancing reforms act and affect industrial reorganization.

This thesis includes three main chapters that are the outcome of different research projects. All chapters stand as independent papers, but they are linked by the common focus on firm financial factors and export behavior, and by the use of microeconometric methodologies applied to firm-level data. The first two chapters investigate, respectively, the impact of export activity on firms’ access to credit and the role of corporate financial structure as a determinant of exporters’ ability to compete on foreign markets through quality. The third chapter looks instead at the scope for promoting investment and exports of small and medium enterprises through the introduction of more favorable Corporate Taxation rates.

This thesis includes three main chapters that are the outcome of different research projects. All chapters stand as independent papers, but they are linked by the common focus on firm financial factors and export behavior, and by the use of microeconometric methodologies applied to firm-level data. The first two chapters investigate, respectively, the impact of export activity on firms’ access to credit and the role of corporate financial structure as a determinant of exporters’ ability to compete on foreign markets through quality. The third chapter looks instead at the scope for promoting investment and exports of small and medium enterprises through the introduction of more favorable Corporate Taxation rates.

Women account for about half of the world’s population, and they generally face several barriers to participation in the labor force, run their business, and reach the higher echelon of their careers. Culture, religious views, and gender-related stereotypes are among the major identified constraints (Comi et al., 2019). A burgeoning literature in economics seeks to understand the effect of top managers’ or board of directors’ gender on firm performance. However, prior studies have focused on the cases of developed countries such as Italy, Norway, among others. (Comi et al., 2019; Ferreira, 2009; Flabbi et al., 2016; Kenneth and Amy, 2012). This thesis attempts to contribute to the research gap by examining the relationship between the gender of the owners or the board directors and the firm performance in two developing countries—Brazil and Malaysia. In the first chapter, I specifically focus on the role of gender in firm performance and access to credit in the case of Brazil. In the second chapter, instead, I explore the impact of gender diversification of the board of directors on firm performance in the case of Malaysia. In contrast to some studies that focus on the difference in firm performance based on the gender of owners or board directors, this study investigates multiple dimensions of firm performance. This thesis uses various firm performance metrics based on the available information in each dataset. The number of employees, total revenue, sales growth, employee growth, labor productivity, value-added per worker, and export propensity is considered for the study in case of Brazil; while total revenue, asset, profit margin, Return on Equity (ROE), and Tobin’s Q are used for the study in case of Malaysia. This thesis, therefore, provides a well-rounded and compressive analysis of the role of gender of owners or board of directors in firm performance. Further, it addresses the impact of gender diversification among the board of directors on firm performance. The majority of prior studies use cross-sectional data, making it difficult to identify causal links (Hillman et al., 2007; Julizaerma and Mohamad, 2012; Post and Byron, 2014). It also considers the influence of other factors such as age, education, and experience of board directors and investigates the existence of heterogeneous effect of gender diversification among the board of directors based on the firm size, sectors, and the status of competitiveness of the firm. Furthermore, it explores an important point that never explored in connection with gender diversification, which is the relationship between the share of directors having family relationships and firm performance. It also investigates the impact of gender diversification requirement in the Malaysian board of directors on the share of directors who have family relations.

In the present thesis I study the contribution to firm value of inventories management from a risk management perspective. I find a significant contribution of inventories to the value of risk management especially through the operating flexibility channel. In contrast, I do not find evidence supporting the view of inventories a reserve of liquidity. Inventories substitute, albeit not perfectly, derivatives or cash holdings. The substitution between hedging with derivatives and inventory is moderated by the correlation between cash flow and the underlying asset in the derivative contract. Hedge ratios increase with the effectiveness of derivatives. The decision to hedge with cash holdings or inventories is strongly influenced by the degree of complementarity between production factors and by cash flow volatility. In addition, I provide a risk management based explanation of the secular substitution between inventories and cash holdings documented, among others, in Bates et al. (2009), Journal of Finance. In a sample of U.S. firms between 1980 and 2006, I empirically confirm the negative relation between inventories and cash and provide evidence on the poor performance of investment cash flow sensitivities as a measure of financial constraints also in the case of inventories investment. This result can be explained by firms' scarce reliance on inventories as a reserve of liquidity. Finally, as an extension of my study, I contrast with empirical data the theoretical predictions of a model on the integrated management of inventories, trade credit and cash holdings.

In the present thesis I study the contribution to firm value of inventories management from a risk management perspective. I find a significant contribution of inventories to the value of risk management especially through the operating flexibility channel. In contrast, I do not find evidence supporting the view of inventories a reserve of liquidity. Inventories substitute, albeit not perfectly, derivatives or cash holdings. The substitution between hedging with derivatives and inventory is moderated by the correlation between cash flow and the underlying asset in the derivative contract. Hedge ratios increase with the effectiveness of derivatives. The decision to hedge with cash holdings or inventories is strongly influenced by the degree of complementarity between production factors and by cash flow volatility. In addition, I provide a risk management based explanation of the secular substitution between inventories and cash holdings documented, among others, in Bates et al. (2009), Journal of Finance. In a sample of U.S. firms between 1980 and 2006, I empirically confirm the negative relation between inventories and cash and provide evidence on the poor performance of investment cash flow sensitivities as a measure of financial constraints also in the case of inventories investment. This result can be explained by firms' scarce reliance on inventories as a reserve of liquidity. Finally, as an extension of my study, I contrast with empirical data the theoretical predictions of a model on the integrated management of inventories, trade credit and cash holdings.

Recent literature of industry dynamics has considered productivity as one of the main source of firm heterogeneity that determines firm performance and growth. The goal of the first chapter on my thesis is to consider demand shocks as another unobserved dimension generating firm heterogeneity. I develop an empirical model combining a CES demand function with a Cobb-Douglas production function. I apply it at Bank of Italy’s Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, a dataset of Italian manufacturing firms containing unique set of information on firm-level prices. Once I obtained consistent estimation of demand elasticity and production function parameters and, as a consequence, estimations of demand and productivity shocks, I study the effect of these shocks on the main firm-level variable. Main findings are that productivity shocks positively affect quasi-fixed input as investments and employment while they have no effect on the variable input whilst demand shocks are able to affect both kind of input. In particular, demand shocks have a great positive impact not only on the most easily modifiable factors in the short run (works hours and capital utilization) but they also affect quasi-fixed input. In particular, the effect on investment are smaller with respect to the one of productivity shocks but the effect on employment is greater in magnitude and it realizes through a positive effect on hiring and a negative one on separations. In the second chapter on my thesis (coauthored with Roberto Casarin) I focus my attention on firms expectations and uncertainty about future business conditions because even if they are some of the main drivers of firm-level decisions concerning investment, employment and capacity utilization, in the empirical literature, there is no evidence of how firms create expectations and, moreover there is no general consensus on how to estimate uncertainty. Exploiting the rich information contained in the INVIND data set, a survey on manufacturing Italian firms collected yearly by the Bank of Italy, this paper goes in the direction to enrich this stream of literature. Precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: first, we present some stylized fact about firm expectations’ formation process and a measure of self-declared uncertainty; second, we propose two measures of firm-level and time-varying uncertainty based of the concept of forecast error; third, we construct micro-founded macro uncertainty measures and we compare them with the standard measures used in the literature 
Finally, the third chapter (co-authored with Agar Brugiavini) has the object to study the determinants of capacity utilization rate in manufacturing firms. The main motivation of this study is that according to the European Commission Investment Survey: low capacity utilization rates were one of the most important factors constraining investment in manufacturing in Italy during and after the crisis because, in general, high rate of capacity utilization implies positive output growth rate, need for investment and high level of demand whilst low rate of capacity utilization implies stagnant output growth rate together with inefficiency and slacks. As a consequence, increasing capacity utilization represents a means of accelerating growth and a well understanding of the determinants of the capacity utilization is essential from an economic policy point of view. This work goes in the direction to unravelling the different factors affecting capacity utilization from a firm-level perspective analysing a panel of Italian manufacturing firms. We find that capacity utilization is negatively affected by uncertainty (even if with strong differences at sectorial level) and that firms with high market power tend to exhibit higher rates of capacity utilization.

The “gender gap” is the phenomenon quite present worldwide, it highlights inequity between men and women. The reasons for this are several, they are personal but also external: indeed stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination against women are rooted in society. (Fiske, 1998) This study is focused on the “glass ceiling”, which is the vertical sectoral segregation and the impact that women directors (gender board diversity) have on firm performance. Previous literature has shown different results, some has evidenced a positive relationship between the two aspects, some negative and others have proved that there is no significant correlation between the two. According to the case-study research, there is evidence of the relationship between specific women's attribute and firm value. It suggests that it is not the women's mere presence on boards to influence firm performance.

This dissertation provides an in-depth assessment of current knowledge on the conceptualization of employee voice in various literatures. We offer an integrative analysis of HRM, IR, and OB perspectives with respect to the topic of voice. Then, we investigate the results of implementing voice mechanisms in the specific context of small and medium-sized firms and in representative European contexts. We also assess the role of human capital in the effectiveness of voice mechanisms.

The thesis investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and international trade from the perspective of a developing country. The standard heterogeneous firm trade models (Melitz, 2003; Bernard et. al, 2003) have largely focused on differences among firms in terms of an exogenously given productivity which would explain why only some firms self-select into international markets while the others serve the domestic market. Empirical evidences, especially from developing countries, note that firms’ selection into export is also the result of conscious investment decisions by firms that aim to improve their productivity and product attributes with explicit purpose of becoming exporters (Lòpez, 2004). In order to further understand the selection mechanism of developing countries’ firms into international markets, this thesis explores the roles of prices, quality and access to finance differences across firms as additional sources of heterogeneity, as well as their interaction. The thesis is composed of three self-standing but related empirical papers that exploit a unique panel data set that come from the annual Ethiopian Large and Medium Scale Manufacturing Enterprise census, and one concluding chapter with policy implications. The census is run by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA). Unusual in many firm-level surveys, this data set provides plant-product level information on quantity and value of production and sales in both the domestic and foreign markets. Among other information, the census also collects data on the obstacles that firms face in their activities including financial resources. The richness of the data set allows constructing plant-product-level price and quality index, and firm-level access to finance indicators. The first chapter investigates the role of price heterogeneity and demand factors in examining the link between export and productivity. One of the well-known empirical regularities in the literature is that, on average, exporters are more “productive†than non-exporters (ISGEP, 2008; Wagner, 2012). Despite this consensus, what the referred productivity really captures remains blurred: since quantity information is rarely available in most data sets, the standard approach is to proxy quantity by firm-level revenues deflated by industry-level price indices. However, this approach ignores within-sector price heterogeneity and, as a result, it confounds physical efficiency (output per unit input) and demand components into the revenue-based productivity estimates (De Loecker, 2011). This bias would be further exacerbated when firms operate in different markets, and thus have different pricing strategies. To the extent that the demand structure is different in domestic and foreign markets, it is reasonable to expect price differences between exporters and non-exporters, not to mention within-sector variations. Using a rich panel data from Ethiopian manufacturing firms, the first chapter characterizes firms by three distinctive margins that are confounded in revenue productivity: physical productivity, output prices and demand shocks, and examines the relationship between these different sources of competencies of firms, and their separate role in shaping export participation. The main results show that exporters are more productive than non-exporters in both revenue and quantity based productivity measures. However, the productivity gap is larger in revenue productivity. Regarding the decision to export, revenue productivity and price significantly explain probability to export, but physical productivity hardly plays a role. Further evidence shows that price is increasing in revenue productivity and decreasing in physical productivity. On average, exporters charge higher prices than non-exporters. The overall results suggest that revenue productivity overstate the relationship between export and productivity because exporters have favourable demand condition that allows them to charge higher prices than non-exporters. This finding provides a new insight in understanding how export contributes to aggregate productivity growth. To the extent that exporters are more productive than non-exporters, the findings about prices are at odds with the standard firm heterogeneity model of Melitz (2003), where more productive firms have lower marginal costs and thus charge lower prices. The second chapter addresses this puzzle, further investigating the determinants of firms’ decision to export. To this end, I refer to the analytical framework that extends the standard firm heterogeneity model by introducing quality (e.g., Hallak and Sivadsan, 2013). Recent empirical findings also confirm that exported products feature higher prices than domestic products, and this price difference is ascribed to quality differences (for example see, Iacovone and Javorcik, 2012). Nevertheless, even if prices do correlate with quality, a major limitation of using prices as a proxy for quality lies in the inability to distinguish between quality and cost factors. To address this issue, I follow the recent empirical strategy proposed by Khandelwal (2010) to estimate quality, thus relaxing the assumption product quality is fully captured by its price. The results show that high-price products are more likely to be exported. However, once price is adjusted for quality difference, products with higher quality-adjusted price are less likely to enter into foreign markets. Jointly these results suggest that the observed price-export relationship reflects quality differences. Furthermore, I find that quality is the most important factor in determining firm export decision; and the effect of firm efficiency on export mainly operates through the quality channel. Based on an analysis of the dynamics of quality and product entry, I find that high-quality products self-select into export. Specifically, the trajectories of exported products show that quality upgrading took place three years prior to export entry. In the run-up phases of export entry, firms also change the composition of their production in favor of future exported varieties. The third chapter, is the result of a joint work with my supervisor Stefano Schiavo, and investigates the mechanisms through which access to bank credit affects firms export. In particular it examines the interplay between financial constraints and product quality in explaining firms’ export behavior using information on a panel of Ethiopian manufacturing firms. Similar to many recent studies, the previous chapter suggests that quality matters a lot for export and, moreover, that firms need to make conscious investment decisions aimed at upgrading their product quality before entering foreign markets. The implication is that, in addition to its direct effect on firms’ ability to pay upfront entry costs, access to finance may affect export decisions through its effect on investment. Since firms in developing countries have typically limited internal revenue and operate in underdeveloped financial markets, financial resources are especially important in shaping the decision to export. The main results confirm the presence of substantial sunk costs associated with exporting. Despite this, bank ï¬ nance does not appear to have a strong direct effect on export participation. On the other hand, both present and past product quality is robustly associated with export status, and quality upgrading requires substantial investment. Therefore, bank credit is relevant for export only insofar as it is channeled to the ï¬ xed investments required to enhance quality. An important implication of this chapter is that improving financial conditions and access to bank credit can help firms to move from low- to high-quality products, enhance their ability to access foreign markets and therefore improve the overall export performance of the economy. The common message of all the three chapters is that the success of Ethiopian firms in international market is mainly driven by demand factors in which only firms that able to attract demand for their products succeed in foreign markets. However, despite the presumed relevance of firm productivity efficiency to drive export, there is no strong evidence that this apply for Ethiopian firms. Further analyses of the demand factors unveil the crucial role of product quality upgrading in determining firms’ entry into export markets. These findings sheds some light on the sources of the productivity difference between exporters and non-exporters that have been found in the literature, including studies focusing on African firms (for example, Van Biesebroeck 2005, and Bigsten and Gebreeyesus 2009). Furthermore, it confirms the general importance of satisfying foreign market quality standards for firms in developing countries to succeed in international markets (Chen et.al., 2008). The evidence suggests that export promoting policies that exclusively focus on achieving quantitative targets, such as productivity, as a means to increase competitiveness in international markets should be revisited: especially for developing countries, a policy shift from quality to quantity is a right direction to go forward.

Nowadays licensing practices have increased in importance and relevance driving the widespread diffusion of markets for technologies. Firms are shifting from a tactical to a strategic attitude towards licensing, addressing both business and corporate level objectives. The Open Innovation Paradigm has been embraced. Firms rely more and more on collaboration and external sourcing of knowledge. This new model of innovation requires firms to leverage on external technologies to unlock the potential of firms’ internal innovative efforts. In this context, firms’ competitive advantage depends both on their ability to recognize available opportunities inside and outside their boundaries and on their readiness to exploit them in order to fuel their innovation process dynamically. Licensing is one of the ways available to firm to ripe the advantages associated to an open attitude in technology strategy. From the licensee’s point view this implies challenging the so-called not-invented-here syndrome, affecting the more traditional firms that emphasize the myth of internal research and development supremacy. This also entails understanding the so-called cognitive constraints affecting the perfect functioning of markets for technologies that are associated to the costs for the assimilation, integration and exploitation of external knowledge by recipient firms. My thesis aimed at shedding light on new interesting issues associated to in-licensing activities that have been neglected by the literature on licensing and markets for technologies. The reason for this gap is associated to the “perspective bias” affecting the works within this stream of research. With very few notable exceptions, they have been generally concerned with the investigation of the so-called licensing dilemma of the licensor – whether to license out or to internally exploit the in-house developed technologies, while neglecting the licensee’s perspective. In my opinion, this has left rooms for improving the understanding of the determinants and conditions affecting licensing-in practices. From the licensee’s viewpoint, the licensing strategy deals with the search, integration, assimilation, exploitation of external technologies. As such it lies at the very hearth of firm’s technology strategy. Improving our understanding of this strategy is thus required to assess the full implications of in-licensing decisions as they shape firms’ innovation patterns and technological capabilities evolution. It also allow for understanding the so-called cognitive constraints associated to the not-invented-here syndrome. In recognition of that, the aim of my work is to contribute to the theoretical and empirical literature explaining the determinants of the licensee’s behavior, by providing a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as ad-hoc conceptual tools to understand and overcome frictions and to ease the achievement of satisfactory technology transfer agreements in the marketplace. Aiming at this, I investigate licensing-in in three different fashions developed in three research papers. In the first work, I investigate the links between licensing and the patterns of firms’ technological search diversification according to the framework of references of the Search literature, Resource-based Theory and the theory of general purpose technologies. In the second paper - that continues where the first one left off – I analyze the new concept of learning-bylicensing, in terms of development of new knowledge inside the licensee firms (e.g. new patents) some years after the acquisition of the license, according to the Dynamic Capabilities perspective. Finally, in the third study, Ideal with the determinants of the remuneration structure of patent licenses (form and amount), and in particular on the role of the upfront fee from the licensee’s perspective. Aiming at this, I combine the insights of two theoretical approaches: agency and real options theory.

Nowadays licensing practices have increased in importance and relevance driving the widespread diffusion of markets for technologies. Firms are shifting from a tactical to a strategic attitude towards licensing, addressing both business and corporate level objectives. The Open Innovation Paradigm has been embraced. Firms rely more and more on collaboration and external sourcing of knowledge. This new model of innovation requires firms to leverage on external technologies to unlock the potential of firms’ internal innovative efforts. In this context, firms’ competitive advantage depends both on their ability to recognize available opportunities inside and outside their boundaries and on their readiness to exploit them in order to fuel their innovation process dynamically. Licensing is one of the ways available to firm to ripe the advantages associated to an open attitude in technology strategy. From the licensee’s point view this implies challenging the so-called not-invented-here syndrome, affecting the more traditional firms that emphasize the myth of internal research and development supremacy. This also entails understanding the so-called cognitive constraints affecting the perfect functioning of markets for technologies that are associated to the costs for the assimilation, integration and exploitation of external knowledge by recipient firms. My thesis aimed at shedding light on new interesting issues associated to in-licensing activities that have been neglected by the literature on licensing and markets for technologies. The reason for this gap is associated to the “perspective bias” affecting the works within this stream of research. With very few notable exceptions, they have been generally concerned with the investigation of the so-called licensing dilemma of the licensor – whether to license out or to internally exploit the in-house developed technologies, while neglecting the licensee’s perspective. In my opinion, this has left rooms for improving the understanding of the determinants and conditions affecting licensing-in practices. From the licensee’s viewpoint, the licensing strategy deals with the search, integration, assimilation, exploitation of external technologies. As such it lies at the very hearth of firm’s technology strategy. Improving our understanding of this strategy is thus required to assess the full implications of in-licensing decisions as they shape firms’ innovation patterns and technological capabilities evolution. It also allow for understanding the so-called cognitive constraints associated to the not-invented-here syndrome. In recognition of that, the aim of my work is to contribute to the theoretical and empirical literature explaining the determinants of the licensee’s behavior, by providing a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as ad-hoc conceptual tools to understand and overcome frictions and to ease the achievement of satisfactory technology transfer agreements in the marketplace. Aiming at this, I investigate licensing-in in three different fashions developed in three research papers. In the first work, I investigate the links between licensing and the patterns of firms’ technological search diversification according to the framework of references of the Search literature, Resource-based Theory and the theory of general purpose technologies. In the second paper - that continues where the first one left off – I analyze the new concept of learning-bylicensing, in terms of development of new knowledge inside the licensee firms (e.g. new patents) some years after the acquisition of the license, according to the Dynamic Capabilities perspective. Finally, in the third study, Ideal with the determinants of the remuneration structure of patent licenses (form and amount), and in particular on the role of the upfront fee from the licensee’s perspective. Aiming at this, I combine the insights of two theoretical approaches: agency and real options theory.

Risk is linked to a condition of partial lack of knowledge and information in the time to come. This characteristic makes it challenging for economic agents to provide an accurate measure of the probability distribution concerning a particular event and the magnitude of consequences related to its occurrence. Although risk can have very negative influences, it is also the reason why businesses are compensated with higher returns. Therefore, it should not be perceived only in a downward perspective, since it can offer to companies the opportunity to create additional value, increase competitive power and achieve targets. In particular, the implementation of appropriate risk management programs allows enterprises to proactively manage risky forces, while still complying with their short and long-term objectives. The purpose of the thesis is investigating the rational underlying the decision of implementing risk management programs and their effect on firm’s value. The analysis will start with a review of the theoretical and methodological perspectives, providing rationales on risk management and corporate hedging. In the theoretical assumption of perfect capital markets, the risk management discipline is considered to be irrelevant for the creation of firm value. Without taxes, agency costs, asymmetric information, costly external sources of finance, direct and indirect costs of bankruptcy, a company is equally likely to perform well regardless its financing choices and risk management decisions. In practice, the occurrence of risk along with the presence of financial market imperfections, makes companies behave in a risk-adverse manner. Considering the increasing centrality that risk has assumed on the decision-making process, the discipline of risk management has become a meaningful element incorporated into the strategy of the firm. Generally, risk management is considered to be primarily a defensive move, thereby the decision of companies to hedge their position is associated with the activity of holding financial derivatives and insurance policies. Actually, this practice represents just one side of the coin. Risk management has to be analyzed more broadly in order to include all the facets and actions taken by firms to deal with uncertainty and it has to consider also the managerial capability to exploit opportunities and the ability to gain competitive edge. Since businesses are vulnerable to a comprehensive risk package, theoretical literature operates an important classification on the basis of the risk nature. More precisely, it clusters risk into two components: the market and corporate risk. While market risk has an exogenous nature and it arises from macroeconomic factors, corporate risk has an endogenous nature since it is related to specific characteristics that are distinctive and specific for the single business. Depending on the nature of risk source, businesses handle risk and uncertainty by adopting financial or operational hedging programs. While financial derivatives and insurance contracts have been preferred at the firm level for handling respectively market and insurable risk, operational hedging techniques manage the risk associated with the specific characteristics of the business. Each company that is involved in risky activities need to estimate the extent of risk to which it is exposed and the impact of its endogenous and exogenous component. In order to understand the reason why some firms hedge their risk exposure and how they do so, an empirical analysis based on the European experience will be conducted. The purpose of the analysis consists in verifying whether a particular correlation or pattern among the set of companies operating in the Euro Area actually exist. Furthermore, demographic and financial information will be examined in order to carry out a more detailed and in-depth analysis of the object of study.

Departmental absorptive capacity: its conceptualization and role for cross-functional integration. The role of departmental absorptive capacities at the R&D-marketing interface for innovation performance: evidence from the italian manufacturing industry. How much knowledge integration in MNCs? An agent-based model to find the optimal degree of knowledge integration considering environmental complexity and turbulence.

In the thesis I exploit an empirical analysis on firm'’s productivity. I relate the efficiency at plant level with the input market features and I suggest an estimation technique for production function that takes into account firm'’s liquidity constraints. The main results are three. When I consider services as inputs for manufacturing firm’'s production process, I find that more competition in service sector affects positively plant’s productivity and export decision. Secondly liquidity constraints are important for the calculation of firm'’s productivity because they are a second source of firm's heterogeneity. Third liquidity constraints are important for firm'’s internationalization

In the thesis I exploit an empirical analysis on firm'’s productivity. I relate the efficiency at plant level with the input market features and I suggest an estimation technique for production function that takes into account firm'’s liquidity constraints. The main results are three. When I consider services as inputs for manufacturing firm’'s production process, I find that more competition in service sector affects positively plant’s productivity and export decision. Secondly liquidity constraints are important for the calculation of firm'’s productivity because they are a second source of firm's heterogeneity. Third liquidity constraints are important for firm'’s internationalization

The thesis investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and international trade from the perspective of a developing country. The standard heterogeneous firm trade models (Melitz, 2003; Bernard et. al, 2003) have largely focused on differences among firms in terms of an exogenously given productivity which would explain why only some firms self-select into international markets while the others serve the domestic market. Empirical evidences, especially from developing countries, note that firms’ selection into export is also the result of conscious investment decisions by firms that aim to improve their productivity and product attributes with explicit purpose of becoming exporters (Lòpez, 2004). In order to further understand the selection mechanism of developing countries’ firms into international markets, this thesis explores the roles of prices, quality and access to finance differences across firms as additional sources of heterogeneity, as well as their interaction. The thesis is composed of three self-standing but related empirical papers that exploit a unique panel data set that come from the annual Ethiopian Large and Medium Scale Manufacturing Enterprise census, and one concluding chapter with policy implications. The census is run by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA). Unusual in many firm-level surveys, this data set provides plant-product level information on quantity and value of production and sales in both the domestic and foreign markets. Among other information, the census also collects data on the obstacles that firms face in their activities including financial resources. The richness of the data set allows constructing plant-product-level price and quality index, and firm-level access to finance indicators. The first chapter investigates the role of price heterogeneity and demand factors in examining the link between export and productivity. One of the well-known empirical regularities in the literature is that, on average, exporters are more “productive” than non-exporters (ISGEP, 2008; Wagner, 2012). Despite this consensus, what the referred productivity really captures remains blurred: since quantity information is rarely available in most data sets, the standard approach is to proxy quantity by firm-level revenues deflated by industry-level price indices. However, this approach ignores within-sector price heterogeneity and, as a result, it confounds physical efficiency (output per unit input) and demand components into the revenue-based productivity estimates (De Loecker, 2011). This bias would be further exacerbated when firms operate in different markets, and thus have different pricing strategies. To the extent that the demand structure is different in domestic and foreign markets, it is reasonable to expect price differences between exporters and non-exporters, not to mention within-sector variations. Using a rich panel data from Ethiopian manufacturing firms, the first chapter characterizes firms by three distinctive margins that are confounded in revenue productivity: physical productivity, output prices and demand shocks, and examines the relationship between these different sources of competencies of firms, and their separate role in shaping export participation. The main results show that exporters are more productive than non-exporters in both revenue and quantity based productivity measures. However, the productivity gap is larger in revenue productivity. Regarding the decision to export, revenue productivity and price significantly explain probability to export, but physical productivity hardly plays a role. Further evidence shows that price is increasing in revenue productivity and decreasing in physical productivity. On average, exporters charge higher prices than non-exporters. The overall results suggest that revenue productivity overstate the relationship between export and productivity because exporters have favourable demand condition that allows them to charge higher prices than non-exporters. This finding provides a new insight in understanding how export contributes to aggregate productivity growth. To the extent that exporters are more productive than non-exporters, the findings about prices are at odds with the standard firm heterogeneity model of Melitz (2003), where more productive firms have lower marginal costs and thus charge lower prices. The second chapter addresses this puzzle, further investigating the determinants of firms’ decision to export. To this end, I refer to the analytical framework that extends the standard firm heterogeneity model by introducing quality (e.g., Hallak and Sivadsan, 2013). Recent empirical findings also confirm that exported products feature higher prices than domestic products, and this price difference is ascribed to quality differences (for example see, Iacovone and Javorcik, 2012). Nevertheless, even if prices do correlate with quality, a major limitation of using prices as a proxy for quality lies in the inability to distinguish between quality and cost factors. To address this issue, I follow the recent empirical strategy proposed by Khandelwal (2010) to estimate quality, thus relaxing the assumption product quality is fully captured by its price. The results show that high-price products are more likely to be exported. However, once price is adjusted for quality difference, products with higher quality-adjusted price are less likely to enter into foreign markets. Jointly these results suggest that the observed price-export relationship reflects quality differences. Furthermore, I find that quality is the most important factor in determining firm export decision; and the effect of firm efficiency on export mainly operates through the quality channel. Based on an analysis of the dynamics of quality and product entry, I find that high-quality products self-select into export. Specifically, the trajectories of exported products show that quality upgrading took place three years prior to export entry. In the run-up phases of export entry, firms also change the composition of their production in favor of future exported varieties. The third chapter, is the result of a joint work with my supervisor Stefano Schiavo, and investigates the mechanisms through which access to bank credit affects firms export. In particular it examines the interplay between financial constraints and product quality in explaining firms’ export behavior using information on a panel of Ethiopian manufacturing firms. Similar to many recent studies, the previous chapter suggests that quality matters a lot for export and, moreover, that firms need to make conscious investment decisions aimed at upgrading their product quality before entering foreign markets. The implication is that, in addition to its direct effect on firms’ ability to pay upfront entry costs, access to finance may affect export decisions through its effect on investment. Since firms in developing countries have typically limited internal revenue and operate in underdeveloped financial markets, financial resources are especially important in shaping the decision to export. The main results confirm the presence of substantial sunk costs associated with exporting. Despite this, bank finance does not appear to have a strong direct effect on export participation. On the other hand, both present and past product quality is robustly associated with export status, and quality upgrading requires substantial investment. Therefore, bank credit is relevant for export only insofar as it is channeled to the fixed investments required to enhance quality. An important implication of this chapter is that improving financial conditions and access to bank credit can help firms to move from low- to high-quality products, enhance their ability to access foreign markets and therefore improve the overall export performance of the economy. The common message of all the three chapters is that the success of Ethiopian firms in international market is mainly driven by demand factors in which only firms that able to attract demand for their products succeed in foreign markets. However, despite the presumed relevance of firm productivity efficiency to drive export, there is no strong evidence that this apply for Ethiopian firms. Further analyses of the demand factors unveil the crucial role of product quality upgrading in determining firms’ entry into export markets. These findings sheds some light on the sources of the productivity difference between exporters and non-exporters that have been found in the literature, including studies focusing on African firms (for example, Van Biesebroeck 2005, and Bigsten and Gebreeyesus 2009). Furthermore, it confirms the general importance of satisfying foreign market quality standards for firms in developing countries to succeed in international markets (Chen et.al., 2008). The evidence suggests that export promoting policies that exclusively focus on achieving quantitative targets, such as productivity, as a means to increase competitiveness in international markets should be revisited: especially for developing countries, a policy shift from quality to quantity is a right direction to go forward.

The recent global financial crisis has drawn the attention of corporate stakeholders including scholars to re-examine the role of corporate governance practices across entities. Specifically, policymakers questioned the extent to which bank corporate governance practices and the failure of the boards to monitor executives may have led to excessive risk-taking and consequently financial instability. On this account, this thesis set out to investigate the role of Governance configurations in determining the outcomes pertaining to contemporary issues in the corporate world: performance and risk-taking considerations. A careful review of the extant research addressing the relationships between bank board governance mechanisms and performance in the context of the agency theory demonstrates little consistency in results. Specifically, neither board size, independence, female directorships, board leadership structure nor monitoring exerted by institutional owners has been consistently linked to bank performance. In an attempt to resolve the prevailing inconsistencies, Chapter 1 of this thesis theorize an institutionally embedded agency viewpoint to undertake a meta-analysis of 47 empirical studies of bank board composition and their relationship to performance. Aside from our results providing aggregate evidence of a systematic association between board independence, female directorship and bank performance, the theoretical upshot of our analysis is provocative. That is, agency theory alone cannot fully capture the dynamics of bank performance, and that it must be integrated with an institution-based view. Consequently, the study concludes congruence between its findings and the recent crusade by governance scholars (Rediker &Seth, 1995; Oh et al., 2016) to assess organizational outcomes on the rubric of governance mechanism bundles. Hence, as a recommendation for future studies and foundational to our methodological and theoretical designs in the subsequent chapters, we focus on the bundles of governance mechanisms to aids our deeper understanding of the corporate governance effect on bank-risk taking and corporate tax management practices. The second essay focuses on the bundling effects of internal and external governance mechanism on a critical subject for which banks were considered pivotal during the crisis: systemic risk. Using a sample of large European banks from 2000 to 2016, this chapter analyzes how monitoring by institutional investors complements or substitutes various board-level governance mechanisms in determining a bank’s systemic risk taking. The findings largely show that external (institutional ownership) and internal (board level) governance mechanisms complement each other to determine systemic risk among sample domestic systemically important banks. Our results are robust to other econometric specification of systemic risk and additional controls. The most important implication of this chapter is the support for the concept of “equifinality”, which informs practitioners of the strategic flexibility in terms of configuring their corporate governance structures to attain similar levels of systemic risk. The essay in Chapter 3 is motivated by the view of Hanlon and Heitzman (2010) that describes corporate tax avoidance as a risk-taking activity with returns commensurate with the aggressiveness of the strategy. Based on this premise, I investigate if the prevailing governance mechanisms determine the roles of CSR committee either as an ethical or risk management structure. We test our conjecture using a global cross-industry sample of firms for the years 2002-2015. By integrating the agency with the legitimacy and corporate culture theories, I show that the CSR committee is mostly a risk management tool for firm legitimization. This consequently facilitates the balancing of stakeholder interests to subtly emphasizes a new role of the board of directors opined by the stakeholder theory.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and Corporate Governance on Firm Value. In particular, the first part of the thesis introduces the theory about Risk Management and its evolution until ERM, and discusses the relationship between ERM and Corporate Governance. Then, the study presents the empirical analysis in which the aim is to question whether the adoption of ERM and a structured Corporate Governance have a positive impact on firm value. In order to answer, a panel of data containing information about firms of the STOXX 50 Europe index has been constructed for the period going from 2019 to 2010. With this purpose, information regarding ERM's adoption have been found in the annual reports, while an index regarding the complexity of the corporate governance structure of each firm has been developed. In addition, an analysis on the determinants for ERM's adoption has been elaborated through a fixed effects logit regression.

This paper investigates whether there is any relationship between ownership characteristics and the goodness of a firm's corporate governance, its capability to attract financial resources and its merit of credit. At the same time, the paper investigates whether capital structure decisions are influenced by corporate governance mechanisms. Ten different Developed Countries are considered. We found out that: i) despite some occasional similarities in terms of corporate governance and ownership characteristics among the ten countries included in our sample, still many differences exists; ii) at Country level of analysis, a correspondence is found between better characteristics of the corporate governance and a stronger corporate performance, increasing their capability of attracting financial resources, and improving their merit of credit; iii) nevertheless, at individual firm level, corporate governance and ownership characteristics do not have a significant impact of firms' performance and their merit of credit; iv) capital structure decisions are influenced by the presence of a manager in the ownership structure and board of directors size. This let us conclude that ownership characteristics influence corporate governance standing, but the latter is not strong enough to influence firms' performance and merit of credit.

Lo IAS 24 definisce un’operazione tra parti correlate come un trasferimento di risorse, servizi o obbligazioni tra tali parti indipendentemente se sia pagato o meno un prezzo. La maggior parte di queste transazioni sono normali, legali e soddisfano le necessità economiche della società che vi partecipa, con la possibilità di creare valore per la società che le attua e per il suo gruppo, ma la speciale relazione tra le due parti nell’operazione può, talvolta, creare un potenziale conflitto di interessi se una di loro ha una particolare influenza sulle politiche decisionali dell’altra. Per tale ragione i soggetti che hanno il controllo potrebbero esercitare tale influenza al fine di ottenere dei vantaggi propri ed espropriare risorse a coloro che non hanno abbastanza potere nelle decisioni di gruppo. La prima parte del lavoro esamina la normativa nazionale ed internazionale, sintetizzando le definizioni di parte correlata, di transazione tra parti correlate e schematizzando le informazioni da fornire in bilancio in presenza di tali operazioni, in relazione agli IAS, ai principi contabili nazionali, al Codice Civile, al TUF, alle delibere e ai regolamenti Consob, concludendo con i principi di revisione per evidenziare le operazioni fraudolente tra parti correlate. Nella seconda parte si analizza la precedente letteratura nazionale ed internazionale principalmente per far emergere le motivazioni alla base dell’esistenza di tali operazioni (Tunneling – Propping e Earnings management) fornendo anche una selezionata raccolta di importanti concetti, utili per una migliore comprensione del tema affrontato come il controllo, la corporate governance, le normative sulla protezione degli azionisti di minoranza, la tassazione e il transfer price, la definizione di struttura finanziaria e di rapporto di indebitamento e alla fine una spiegazione del concetto di performance aziendale. Il terzo capitolo presenta, invece, un’analisi empirica su un campione di società quotate nel mercato italiano che mette in evidenza come alcune operazioni tra parti correlate possono influenzare ed essere influenzate dalla performance aziendale e su come tali transazioni possono dare origine a fenomeni di espropriazione di alcuni azionisti in un gruppo. Infine, le conclusioni di questo studio tentano di sviluppare un pensiero critico su come le operazioni tra parti correlate in un gruppo possono avere un potenziale in termini di creazione del valore per gli attuali e futuri shareholders se vengono utilizzate in modo sostenibile.
The IAS 24 defines a related party transaction as “a transfer of resources, services or obligations between related parties, regardless of whether a price is charged”. The majority of these transactions are completely normal, legal and fulfil the economic needs of the company which takes part in it, with the possibility of creating value for the company and for its group, but the special relationship between the two related parties in the transaction could sometimes create potential conflicts of interest if one of the parties has influence over the operating polices of the other. For this reason subjects who have the control could exert such influence to obtain benefits for themselves and expropriate earnings to ones who do not have enough power in group decisions. The first part of this work analyzes the national and the international laws, summarizing the definition of related parties, the definition of related party transactions and schematizing the information to disclose in the financial statement in the presence of such transactions according to the IAS, national accounting standards, Civil Code, TUF and to Consob’s resolutions and regulations, concluding with the audit procedures for highlighting fraudulent related party transactions. In the second part we analyze the previous literature about related party transactions principally to let the different motivations on the base of the existence of such transactions come out (Tunneling – Propping and Earnings management), giving also a selected set of important concepts, useful for a better understanding of the issue faced, such as control, corporate governance, legal rules to protect minority shareholders, taxation and transfer prices and also the definition of capital structure and leverage and at the end there is an explanation of the concept of firm performance. While, the third chapter presents an empirical analysis on a sample of listed companies in the Italian market which underlines how some related party transactions can influence and be influenced by firm performance and how such transactions give rise to some shareholders’ expropriation phenomenon in a group. Finally, the conclusions of this study try to develop a critical thinking suggesting how related party transactions in a group can have a potential in term of creating value for the actual and for the future shareholders if they are used in a sustainable way.

Motivated by the need to understand which are the underlying forces that trigger network evolution, we develop a multilevel theoretical and empirically testable model to examine the relationship between changes in the external environment and network change. We refer to network change as the dissolution or replacement of an interorganizational tie, adding also the case of the formation of new ties with new or preexisting partners. Previous research has paid scant attention to the organizational consequences of quantum change enveloping entire industries in favor of an emphasis on continuous change. To highlight radical change we introduce the concept of environmental jolt. The September 11 terrorist attacks provide us with a natural experiment to test our hypotheses on the antecedents and the consequences of network change. Since network change can be explained at multiple levels, we incorporate firm-level variables as moderators. The empirical setting is the global airline industry, which can be regarded as a constantly changing network of alliances. The study reveals that firms react to environmental jolts by forming homophilous ties and transitive triads as opposed to the non jolt periods. Moreover, we find that, all else being equal, firms that adopt a brokerage posture will have positive returns. However, we find that in the face of an environmental jolt brokerage relates negatively to firm performance. Furthermore, we find that the negative relationship between brokerage and performance during an environmental jolt is more significant for larger firms. Our findings suggest that jolts are an important predictor of network change, that they significantly affect operational returns and should be thus incorporated in studies of network dynamics.

Motivated by the need to understand which are the underlying forces that trigger network evolution, we develop a multilevel theoretical and empirically testable model to examine the relationship between changes in the external environment and network change. We refer to network change as the dissolution or replacement of an interorganizational tie, adding also the case of the formation of new ties with new or preexisting partners. Previous research has paid scant attention to the organizational consequences of quantum change enveloping entire industries in favor of an emphasis on continuous change. To highlight radical change we introduce the concept of environmental jolt. The September 11 terrorist attacks provide us with a natural experiment to test our hypotheses on the antecedents and the consequences of network change. Since network change can be explained at multiple levels, we incorporate firm-level variables as moderators. The empirical setting is the global airline industry, which can be regarded as a constantly changing network of alliances. The study reveals that firms react to environmental jolts by forming homophilous ties and transitive triads as opposed to the non jolt periods. Moreover, we find that, all else being equal, firms that adopt a brokerage posture will have positive returns. However, we find that in the face of an environmental jolt brokerage relates negatively to firm performance. Furthermore, we find that the negative relationship between brokerage and performance during an environmental jolt is more significant for larger firms. Our findings suggest that jolts are an important predictor of network change, that they significantly affect operational returns and should be thus incorporated in studies of network dynamics.

The upgrading involves different levels of the organizations. In this thesis the focus will be on the upgrading processes that can be carried out at a firm level, with the consequent upgrading of the whole value chain. After the first part of analysis on the literature concerning the global value chain, its governance and the different types of upgrading levels that can be performed, the attention will be moved towards the case of the TEXA company. The aim of the work is to understand how a made in Italy company has been able to survive and to register a very positive path of growth in a scenario that has been far from favorable during the last 20 years. Through a series of interviews to the management and analysis of the data, the period that is considered is the whole 20-years of the activity, with a particular attention to the last 13 which have seen the growth of the internationalization process. The changes that have occurred throughout this period have affected the process, functional , end-market and, marginally, the product upgrading, with the consequent upgrading of the whole value chain. An analysis of the situations before and after the upgrading processes will show how the company has been transformed over the years. The positive trend shown in the growth of the firm demonstrates how the company has been able to invest in its core competencies while being able to explore unknown paths, all driven by the pursuing of the “made in Italy” values that have been characterizing the company since its foundation.

This thesis focuses on some characteristic features of the creative industries located in north-east Italy in order to address them targeted policies. The first step, in trying to outline a description of creative industries, has been to analyze the literature of different European Countries. The outcome is a confused set of classifications very different from one another which do not permit to create a uniform category. Despite all the studies, a shared convention on the “cultural and creative industry” definition is still missing. This reflects in individualizing those sectors which constitute the “cultural and creative industry” area; consequently the data identified in different Countries are not comparable. The second part of the thesis, having noticed the absence of a definition has been dedicated to outline a complete description of the Italian north-eastern creative industries. The aim has been achieved by a survey submitted to a panel of 343 selected creative firms located in Veneto, Trentino Alto Adige and Friuli Venezia Giulia regions. In this way a set of data has been collected, regarding the economic and financial structure, sales, business strategy, innovation, competitive advantages and major obstacles. This analysis has collected high level of agreement on the same answers, allowing to outline a complete identikit starting from the size of the creative firms in terms of turnover and employment until the common competitive advantages and the policies they consider useful for their development. The third part concerns the analysis of policies addressed to creative industries in different European Countries. In many countries, policies for creative industries are at the top of the political agendas, whereas in Italy it is still absent an explicit strategy for this sector. It could be useful to learn from the successful targeted policies put in place by other countries that precede us.

In this thesis the impact of R&D expenditures on firm market value and stock returns is examined. This is performed in a sample of European listed firms for the period 2000-2009. I apply different linear and GMM econometric estimations for testing the impact of R&D on market prices and construct country portfolios based on firms’ R&D expenditure to market capitalization ratio for studying the effect of R&D on stock returns. The results confirm that more innovative firms have a better market valuation,investors consider R&D as an asset that produces long-term benefits for corporations. The impact of R&D on firm value differs across countries. It is significantly modulated by the financial and legal environment where firms operate. Other firm and industry characteristics seem to play a determinant role when investors value R&D. First, only larger firms with lower financial leverage that operate in highly innovative sectors decide to disclose their R&D investment. Second, the markets assign a premium to small firms, which operate in hi-tech sectors compared to larger enterprises for low-tech industries. On the other hand, I provide empirical evidence indicating that generally highly R&D-intensive firms may enhance mispricing problems related to firm valuation. As R&D contributes to the estimation of future stock returns, portfolios that comprise high R&D-intensive stocks may earn significant excess returns compared to the less innovative after controlling for size and book-to-market risk. Further, the most innovative firms are generally more risky in terms of stock volatility but not systematically more risky than low-tech firms. Firms that operate in Continental Europe suffer more mispricing compared to Anglo-Saxon peers but the former are less volatile, other things being equal. The sectors where firms operate are determinant even for the impact of R&D on stock returns; this effect is much stronger in hi-tech industries.

In this thesis the impact of R&D expenditures on firm market value and stock returns is examined. This is performed in a sample of European listed firms for the period 2000-2009. I apply different linear and GMM econometric estimations for testing the impact of R&D on market prices and construct country portfolios based on firms’ R&D expenditure to market capitalization ratio for studying the effect of R&D on stock returns. The results confirm that more innovative firms have a better market valuation,investors consider R&D as an asset that produces long-term benefits for corporations. The impact of R&D on firm value differs across countries. It is significantly modulated by the financial and legal environment where firms operate. Other firm and industry characteristics seem to play a determinant role when investors value R&D. First, only larger firms with lower financial leverage that operate in highly innovative sectors decide to disclose their R&D investment. Second, the markets assign a premium to small firms, which operate in hi-tech sectors compared to larger enterprises for low-tech industries. On the other hand, I provide empirical evidence indicating that generally highly R&D-intensive firms may enhance mispricing problems related to firm valuation. As R&D contributes to the estimation of future stock returns, portfolios that comprise high R&D-intensive stocks may earn significant excess returns compared to the less innovative after controlling for size and book-to-market risk. Further, the most innovative firms are generally more risky in terms of stock volatility but not systematically more risky than low-tech firms. Firms that operate in Continental Europe suffer more mispricing compared to Anglo-Saxon peers but the former are less volatile, other things being equal. The sectors where firms operate are determinant even for the impact of R&D on stock returns; this effect is much stronger in hi-tech industries.

Over the last century, customers have become increasingly uncertain about how to be satisfied because of the growing complexity of their own needs. On the one hand, most standardized needs have been satisfied, whereas on the other hand, worldwide demand for intrinsically complex needs (such as health care and long-term care) has increased, especially because of population ageing. On the supply side, producing on the basis of an estimated foreseen demand has become increasingly difficult and customer uncertainty has become a cause of organizational inefficiency. Nevertheless, in the theories of the firm so far developed, the customer is still a missing player, confined to the position of 'rational agent'. This research discusses how organizational efficiency is impacted by customer uncertainty in taking consumption decisions when the needs are complex. The central issue is to understand when it is efficient for the organization to involve the uncertain customer in the production process and, accordingly, which organizational form is the most effective in managing such involvement. Today the lack of clarity regarding this theoretical issue has permitted, or even supported, an imprudent adoption of mass-customization in important sectors which gives customers the option of choosing exclusively from among standardized options, without suitable consideration for both the complexity of their needs and the organization required. My dissertation is organized into three chapters. The first chapter proposes a theoretical framework on the basis of the Modularity Theory of the Firm (Langlois and Robertson 1995; Langlois 2002, 2006; Baldwin and Clark, 2003; 2006), which allows for the identification of the most effective organizational types to face customer uncertainty. The second chapter studies the most efficient way to design and manage production processes in the presence of uncertain customer needs, implying the necessity to involve the customers themselves in the production process. The focus here is also on the design and management of long term care (LTC) services. And the third chapter, by adopting case study research methods for theory building (Eisenhardt, 1989, Yin 2003), in order to investigate the relationship between organizational and production efficiency, analyses five LTC organizations that belong to different categories of modularity and are characterized by different governance forms. Summarizing the results, the thesis firstly theorizes that cooperative governance (the internal organization of labour based on inclusion, participation, and horizontal relations) is the most effective to minimize dynamic transaction costs and the related unexpected production costs (damages, errors, waste of time, legal actions) thanks to developing capabilities related to how to satisfy customers' complex needs. Particularly, the accountability of workers supports a learning-by-doing process that allows for life-long learning and the necessary flexibility to adequately meet customers' needs. Secondly, the study proposes a blueprinting approach to service design and management, which allows for the separation of front/back office in order to improve management efficiency. This structure is particularly suited for supporting decision-making processes in a flat organizational structure (such as the cooperative one), as it clarifies the workflow processes and responsibilities. Thirdly, it empirically applies the theoretical results to situations of long-term care with customer uncertainty and shows how services should be designed in order to maintain a low level of unexpected production costs.

The number of firms using derivatives to hedge their risks has been increasing from the 1970s until now. Although numerous empirical analyses examined the impact of using derivatives on the company’s value, there is still no final conclusion in the literature about this influence. This thesis examines the impact of using commodity derivatives, interest rate derivatives, and currency derivative on the firm’s value of non-financial companies in Singapore over the period 2013-2016. For doing so, we use linear regression and panel data techniques following the study made by Khediri in 2008. The data is collected from the website of the Singapore Exchange Market (SGX) and from the annual reports of each company. The result indicates that there is no strong relationship between using derivatives and the firm’s value.

Does regional science matter nowadays? Several researchers have tried - and are still trying - to answer this question at the light of the fact that fast connections and communication technologies allow economic actors to easily interact and do business with global partners. Anyhow, the local and global dimensions seem to play a complementary role in influencing firms' economic performance and behaviour rather than being substitute factors. In fact, there are many cases of excellence among Italian industrial districts, high-tech clusters, and innovative milieus which suggest the relevance of the local dimension for firms to grow and compete. The analysis of the local economic dimension dates back to the pioneering contribution of MARSHALL on the industrial district concept (Principles of Economics, 1890, Macmillan, London), which highlights the peculiar advantages for a firm from being located in an industrially specialised local system. According to MARSHALL's (1890) analysis, firms operating in a spatially bounded - and specialised - area can benefit from both tangible and intangible effects. Tangible effects are mainly related to the local availability of inputs' suppliers and specialised workers, the reduction of transportation costs, and the emerging of external-scale economies. On the contrary, intangible effects are related to the reduction of transaction costs (favoured by face-to-face and repeated interactions which increase trust, reputation, and reciprocity among the local actors), and the spread of knowledge and (tacit) information flows concerning production processes, technologies, and innovation practices. Moving from these intuitions, economists started to analyse the role played by local forces in influencing the economic performance of regional systems and individual actors (i.e. firms). Attention has also been paid to local-based phenomena other than specialised agglomerated areas. Among these, the role of urban areas and the advantages related to the location in large and industrially diversified cities have been deeply analysed by geographers and regional economists. In particular, agglomeration forces concerning - and arising from - the spatial concentration of the economic activity received great attention in both the theoretical and the empirical literature. The contribution of GLAESER, KALLAL, SCHEINKMAN and SHLEIFER ("Growth in Cities", Journal of Political Economy, 1992, Vol. 100, No. 6, pp. 1126-1152) represented the first attempt to empirically analyse the causal relationship between agglomeration externalities and local economic performance, and it began a wide cross-county literature on the topic. This Thesis moves in this direction and tries to contribute to the debate concerning the relationship between spatial agglomeration forces and firms' economic performance. Specifically, it comes as a collection of three empirical papers dealing with this topic from very different perspectives. The first chapter of the Thesis is entitled "Productivity, Credit Constraints and the Role of Short-Run Localization Economies: Micro-Evidence from Italy". This chapter is single-authored and is forthcoming in Regional Studies (doi:10.1080/00343404.2015.1064883). This paper investigates whether Italian manufacturing firms' productivity is affected by credit constraints, and whether short-run localisation economies foster productivity both directly and indirectly, moderating the negative effects of credit rationing via inter-firm credit relationships. The empirical exercise is based on a sample of 12,524 firms observed over the period 1999-2007 and drawn from the AIDA databank (Bureau Van Dijk), and it is carried out in three steps. First, Total Factor Productivity is estimated at the firm level through the approach proposed by WOOLDRIDGE ("On Estimating Firm-Level Production Functions Using Proxy Variables to Control for Unobservables", Economics Letters, 2009, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 112-114). Second, dynamic investment equations are estimated to investigate whether firms are credit constrained, and to test the potential moderation effect of short-run localisation economies on the investment-to-cash flow sensitivity. Third, an instrumental-variable approach is employed to test whether firms' productivity is negatively affected by credit constraints (i.e. the marginal effect of cash flow on investments), and whether short-run localisation economies positively affect productivity both directly and indirectly, downsizing the negative effects of credit rationing. The results suggest that firms are affected by credit rationing, and that localisation economies positively moderate the investment-to-cash flow sensitivity favouring inter-firm trade credit. It emerges a negative effect of credit rationing on firms' productivity, while localisation economies have both a direct and an indirect positive effect on productivity. In fact, short-run localisation economies seem to reduce the negative credit constraints-productivity relationship by about 4.5%. Finally, the results suggest a complementary effect between localisation economies and the local banking structure: the positive moderation effect of localisation economies on both firms' investment-to-cash flow sensitivity and the credit constraints-productivity relationship increases as the density of bank branches in the local system increases. The second chapter is entitled "Industrial Clusters, Organised Crime and Productivity Growth in Italian SMEs" and is co-authored with Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (LSE). This paper empirically investigates whether organised crime (namely, mafia-type criminality) affects a firm's performance (defined in terms of Total Factor Productivity growth) both directly and indirectly, downsizing positive externalities arising from the geographic concentration of (intra- and inter-industry) market-related firms. Therefore, this paper investigates the simultaneous role played by - and the interplay of - market-based agglomeration economies and organised crime in influencing manufacturing small and medium sized firms' productivity growth. On the one hand, firms operating in a local system characterised by a high density of horizontally- and vertically-interconnected firms (in terms of input-output relationships) may benefit from both tangible (e.g. the reduction of transportation costs, the local availability of inputs' suppliers) and intangible (e.g. the reduction of transaction costs) agglomeration externalities which are likely to foster their productivity growth. On the other hand, organised crime is likely to negatively affect both the socio-economic environment and firms' performance, for instance imposing protection rackets, altering market rules and competition processes. In particular, criminal organisations may break established economic networks among firms, for instance imposing to local firms the acquisition of inputs from "illicit" firms controlled by the criminal organisation itself. The empirical analysis covers a large sample of Italian manufacturing small and medium sized firms observed over the period 2008-2011, and it employs a two-step sample-selection model to control for firm exit over the three-year growth period. The robustness of the results is tested controlling for potential endogeneity of the variables capturing industrial clustering and organised crime, as well as using two different approaches to estimate Total Factor Productivity. The results suggest a negative direct effect of organised crime on firms' productivity growth, while location in a dense local industrial system fosters productivity growth. Moreover, the positive effect of industrial clustering on productivity growth decreases as the level of organised crime increases in the local system, and that this negative moderation effect of organised crime is greater for smaller than for larger firms. Finally, the results suggest that the extortion crime has a very strong incidence in weakening a firm's performance. The third chapter is entitled "Agglomeration, Heterogeneity and Firm Productivity" and is co-authored with Giulio Cainelli (University of Padova). This paper analyses the relationship between agglomeration (i.e. localisation- vs. diversification-type) economies and firms' short-run productivity growth using Italian manufacturing firm-level data. The analysis deals with two key issues. First, it deals with the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) using distance-based agglomeration measures computed for each firm in the sample over a continuous space, thus avoiding the use of pre-defined spatial units of analysis. Second, it explicitly tests the hypothesis of firm heterogeneity in the context of agglomeration phenomena, i.e. it considers the firms located within a given geographic area as heterogeneous units which may contribute to the production of the agglomeration externalities in different ways, and with a different intensity, according to their specific characteristics (defined in terms of size and Total Factor Productivity). This means that firms can be seen both as receivers of the agglomeration externalities, and as producers of these externalities. The results suggest that intra-industry (i.e. localisation-type) externalities have a positive effect on firms' productivity growth at short distances, while a negligible effect at a longer distance (i.e. after 15 km). Moreover, this positive effect seems to decrease as the distance increases. On the contrary, inter-industry (i.e. diversification-type) externalities have a negative effect on firms' productivity growth at a very short distance (i.e. within 5 km), while a positive effect at a longer distance (i.e. after 15 km). Therefore, it emerges a sort of substitution effect between intra- and inter-industry externalities at different distances. It also emerges that firm heterogeneity (in terms of size and productivity) matters in the generation of intra-industry externalities: in fact, the decreasing-with-distance pattern characterising their positive effect changes to an increasing-with-distance pattern when neighbour firms' characteristics are accounted for. It follows an attenuation of the substitution effect between intra- and inter-industry externalities. In fact, they seem to have opposing effects at short distances (i.e. within 15 km), while both types of externalities seem to foster firms' productivity growth at a longer distance (i.e. after 15 km). Moreover, inter-industry externalities seem to have a greater effect on short-run productivity growth than intra-industry externalities.
Quanto contano gli studi regionali oggigiorno? Molti ricercatori hanno cercato - e ancora cercano - di rispondere a questa domanda alla luce dello sviluppo di mezzi e tecnologie di comunicazione che consentono agli attori economici di interagire e condurre affari con partner globali. Ad ogni modo, le dimensioni locale e globale sembrano avere ruoli complementari, anziché sostitutivi, nell'influenzare la performance e le scelte economiche delle imprese. Ciò emerge chiaramente se si considerano casi di successo tra i distretti industriali italiani, i cluster high-tech e i sistemi locali innovativi, che evidenziano la rilevanza della dimensione locale nel promuovere la crescita e la competitività delle imprese. L'analisi della dimensione economica locale trova origine nello studio pioneristico di MARSHALL (Principles of Economics, 1890, Macmillan, London) sul concetto di distretto industriale, in cui sono messi in evidenza i vantaggi peculiari che un'impresa può trarre dall'essere localizzata in un sistema industriale locale altamente specializzato. Nello specifico, MARSHALL (1890) sottolinea come un'impresa che operi in una località geograficamente delimitata - e specializzata in termini di produzione industriale - possa trarre beneficio sia da fattori tangibili, sia da fattori intangibili. I primi riguardano la disponibilità "locale" di fornitori e lavoratori altamente specializzati, la riduzione dei costi di trasporto, e l'emergere di economie di scala esterne. I secondi, al contrario, riguardano la riduzione dei costi di transazione, che risulta facilitata da interazioni dirette e ripetute (tali da accrescere il livello di fiducia, reputazione e reciprocità) tra gli attori economici locali, e la diffusione di conoscenza e flussi di informazioni (tacite) riguardanti processi produttivi, tecnologie e pratiche innovative. L'analisi di MARSHALL (1890) ha spinto molti economisti ad analizzare la relazione tra fattori legati alla dimensione locale e performance economica, sia a livello di sistemi regionali che di imprese. Nel tempo, diverse tipologie di "forze" locali sono state oggetto di studio, oltre ai conglomerati produttivi altamente specializzati. Ad esempio, economisti regionali e geografi hanno rivolto la loro attenzione verso la dimensione urbana e i vantaggi legati alla localizzazione in città caratterizzate da un'ampia diversificazione della struttura industriale. In particolare, numerosi contributi teorici ed empirici hanno sottolineato la rilevanza di esternalità agglomerative legate alla concentrazione spaziale delle attività economiche. Il contributo di GLAESER, KALLAL, SCHEINKMAN and SHLEIFER ("Growth in Cities", Journal of Political Economy, 1992, Vol. 100, No. 6, pp. 1126-1152) è stato il primo tentativo di analizzare empiricamente la relazione di causalità tra esternalità agglomerative e performance economica locale, dando il via ad un'ampia letteratura sul tema. Il presente elaborato (Tesi) si basa su questa letteratura, e cerca di contribuire al dibattito avente ad oggetto la relazione tra forze legate all'agglomerazione spaziale delle attività economiche e performance delle imprese. Nello specifico, questa Tesi è costituita da tre capitoli (papers) che analizzano la suddetta relazione da punti di vista molti differenti. Il primo capitolo della Tesi è intitolato "Productivity, Credit Constraints and the Role of Short-Run Localization Economies: Micro-Evidence from Italy". Questo capitolo è a firma singola, ed è stato accettato per pubblicazione dalla rivista Regional Studies (doi:10.1080/00343404.2015.1064883). Questo capitolo analizza la relazione tra produttività di impresa, razionamento creditizio ed economie di localizzazione di breve termine. Nello specifico, analizza gli effetti diretti di razionamento creditizio ed economie di localizzazione sulla produttività di impresa, così come il potenziale effetto di moderazione (positivo) che le economie di localizzazione possono avere sulla relazione (negativa) tra razionamento creditizio e produttività, promuovendo fenomeni di "inter-firm trade credit". L'analisi empirica utilizza dati di fonte AIDA (Bureau Van Dijk) relativi ad un campione di 12.524 imprese osservate nel corso del periodo 1999-2007. L'analisi è condotto in tre fasi. In primo luogo, la Produttività Totale dei Fattore è stimata a livella di impresa utilizzando l'approccio proposto da WOOLDRIDGE ("On Estimating Firm-Level Production Functions Using Proxy Variables to Control for Unobservables", Economics Letters, 2009, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 112-114). Successivamente, una serie di funzioni di investimento dinamiche sono stimate al fine di analizzare se le imprese del campione siano oggetto di razionamento creditizio, e di testare il potenziale effetto di moderazione delle economie di localizzazione di breve termine sulla relazione tra investimenti e cash flow di impresa. Infine, sono stimati una serie di modelli per variabili strumentali al fine di analizzare se la produttività di impresa sia influenzata negativamente dal razionamento creditizio (definito come effetto marginale del cash flow sugli investimenti), e se le economie di localizzazione di breve termine abbiano sia un effetto positivo diretto sulla produttività, sia un effetto positivo indiretto tale da ridurre gli effetti negativi legati al razionamento creditizio. I risultati empirici suggeriscono che le imprese del campione siano oggetto di razionamento creditizio, e che le economie di localizzazione abbiano un effetto positivo tale da moderare la dipendenza degli investimenti dal cash flow favorendo fenomeni di "inter-firm trade credit". Emerge inoltre un effetto negativo del razionamento creditizio sulla produttività di impresa, mentre le economie di localizzazione sembrano avere un effetto diretto positivo sulla produttività. Allo stesso modo, le economie di localizzazione sembrano avere anche un effetto indiretto positivo sulla produttività: infatti, i risultati mostrano che l'effetto negativo del razionamento creditizio sulla produttività diminuisce del 4,5% quando l'effetto di moderazione delle economie di localizzazione è preso in considerazione. Infine, i risultati mostrano un effetto di complementarietà tra economie di localizzazione e struttura bancaria a livello locale. Infatti, l'effetto indiretto positivo delle economie di localizzazione risulta crescente al crescere della densità di filiali bancarie nel sistema locale di appartenenza dell'impresa. Il secondo capitolo è intitolato "Industrial Clusters, Organised Crime and Productivity Growth in Italian SMEs", ed è co-autorato con Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (LSE). Questo secondo capitolo analizza il ruolo della criminalità organizzata (di tipo mafioso) sulla performance di impresa (definita in termini di crescita della Produttività Totale dei Fattori), considerando anche il suo potenziale effetto indiretto (negativo) sulla relazione (positiva) tra esternalità agglomerative legate alla co-localizzazione di imprese fornitrici (industrial clustering) e crescita della produttività di un campione di piccole e medie imprese manifatturiere italiane. Pertanto, sono presi in esame due differenti (e contrastanti) fattori definiti a livello locale: la criminalità organizzata e la concentrazione spaziale di imprese connesse da relazioni di mercato. Da una parte, imprese che operano in sistemi locali caratterizzati da un'alta densità di imprese potenzialmente connesse (orizzontalmente e verticalmente) da relazioni di mercato possono beneficiare di esternalità agglomerative sia tangibili (ad esempio, la riduzione dei costi di trasporto, la disponibilità di fornitori a livello locale) che intangibili (ad esempio, la riduzione dei costi di transazione), che tendono a favorire la crescita di impresa. Dall'altra parte, la presenza di organizzazioni criminali tende ad avere conseguenze negative sia per l'ambiente socio-economico, sia per la performance di impresa, ad esempio a causa dell'imposizione del pagamento del pizzo, di azioni lesive delle regole di mercato e dei processi competitivi tra imprese. In particolare, la criminalità organizzata opera nel mercato per mezzo di imprese "illegali" direttamente controllate, la cui presenza ed attività (ad esempio, l'imposizione dell'acquisto di input alle imprese "legali") tendono ad indebolire le relazioni di mercato esistenti tra le imprese locali. L'analisi empirica è basata su un campione di piccole e medie imprese manifatturiere italiane osservate nel periodo 2008-2011. L'analisi è condotta applicando modelli di tipo "sample selection", e la robustezza dei risultati è testata controllando per la potenziale endogeneità delle variabili che catturano i fenomeni di criminalità organizzata e agglomerazione industriale, così come stimando la Produttività Totale dei Fattori a livello di impresa per mezzo di due approcci econometrici differenti. I risultati mostrano un effetto diretto negativo della criminalità organizzata sulla crescita della produttività di impresa. AL contrario, la crescita della produttività trae beneficio da un'alta densità di imprese circostanti potenzialmente connesse da relazioni di mercato. I risultati suggeriscono inoltre un effetto negativo indiretto della criminalità organizzata, la cui presenza nel sistema locale sembra ridurre sensibilmente gli effetti positivi dell'agglomerazione di imprese sulla crescita della produttività. Questo risultato sembra particolarmente accentuato per le imprese di più piccole dimensioni. Inoltre, il crimine di estorsione sembra giocare un ruolo chiave in questo scenario. Il terzo capitolo è intitolato "Agglomeration, Heterogeneity and Firm Productivity", ed è co-autorato con Giulio Cainelli (Università di Padova). Questo capitolo analizza la relazione tra economie di agglomerazione (nello specifico, economie di localizzazione e di diversificazione) e crescita della produttività di breve periodo utilizzando un campione di imprese manifatturiere italiane. Nello specifico, due aspetti chiave sono presi in considerazione. Il primo riguarda il cosiddetto "Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP)", che è trattato costruendo variabili di agglomerazione "distance-based" a livello di impresa e assumendo lo spazio come continuo, e cioè evitando l'uso di aree geografiche pre-definite come unità spaziali di analisi. Il secondo riguarda l'ipotesi di eterogeneità di impresa, che nel contesto dei fenomeni agglomerativi si riferisce all'idea che le imprese co-localizzate nello spazio siano unità eterogenee in grado di contribuire alla produzione delle esternalità agglomerative in maniera (e con intensità) differente in base alle loro specifiche caratteristiche (nello specifico, dimensione e Produttività Totale dei Fattori). Assumere eterogeneità di impresa implica assumere che le imprese non solo traggano beneficio dalle esternalità agglomerative, ma anche agiscano come loro "generatori". I risultati suggeriscono che le esternalità intra-industriali (economie di localizzazione) abbiano un effetto positivo sulla crescita della produttività nella breve distanza, mentre un effetto statisticamente non significativo per distanze maggiori (oltre i 15 km). Inoltre, questo effetto positivo risulta inversamente proporzionale rispetto alla distanza. Al contrario, le esternalità inter-industriali (economie di diversificazione) hanno un effetto negativo nella breve distanza (entro i 5 km), mentre un effetto positivo nella lunga distanza (oltre i 15 km). Pertanto, sembra emergere un effetto di sostituzione tra economie di localizzazione e di diversificazione a distanze differenti. I risultano mostrano inoltre l'importanza di considerare l'eterogeneità di impresa (in termini di dimensione e produttività) nel processo di generazione delle esternalità intra-industriali: infatti, quando si tiene conto delle caratteristiche specifiche delle imprese co-localizzate, emerge un effetto positivo delle economie di localizzazione che risulta crescente al crescere della distanza. Emerge quindi un'attenuazione dell'effetto di sostituzione tra esternalità intra- e inter-industriali, che sembrano avere effetti opposti nella breve distanza (entro i 15 km), mentre entrambe sembrano avere un effetto positivo sulla crescita della produttività nella lunga distanza (oltre i 15 km). Inoltre, le economie di diversificazione sembrano avere un effetto maggiore sulla crescita della produttività di breve termine rispetto alle economie di localizzazione.

Firm performance is central to economic growth of developing economies. However, it is affected by the business environments in which a firm operates. These business environments includes: features of legal and regulatory services, infrastructures, financial and institutional systems of the country. A burgeoning literature within development economics seeks to understand the constraints that a firm face and strategies to cope with these problems. However, a rigorous empirical study that informs policy makers and concerned development institutions is still lacking especially in Sub-Sahara African countries where the problem is severe. Thus, this thesis focused on examining the impact of business environment on firm performance and how firms respond to poor business environment. The study mainly focused on examining the impact of poor electricity supply, its economic cost and how firms responds to a poor power supply. The thesis is organized in two chapters. The first chapter “power outages, economic cost and firm performance: Evidence from Ethiopia”deals with how firms in Ethiopia respond to power interruptions and estimating the economic cost of power outages using two rounds of firm-level survey data. The study employed the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data collected from firms operating in Ethiopia during 2011 and 2015. The result shows that firms in Ethiopia self-generate electricity in response to power outages. Power outages were found to affect firms’ productivity negatively, increasing firms’ costs by 15% from 2011 to 2015. This effect varied negatively with output level, suggesting that power outages is particularly costly for small firms. This chapter is a single authored paper and published in the Journal of Utilities Policy (53) 111-120. The article can be accessed from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jup.2018.06.009. The second chapter “firm performance under infrastructure constraint: evidence from Sub-Saharan African firms” deals with the role of investment in self-generation in mitigating outage loss and evaluating the outage loss differential between firms that invested in self-generation and those that didn't. Using the WBES data collected from firms operating in 13 Sub-Saharan African countries, the study provided an evidence that though self-generation has helped firms reduce outage loss, firms that have invested in self-generation continue to face higher unmitigated outage loss compared to firms without such investment. In spite of this, firms that have invested in self-generation would have incurred 36%-99% more than their current outage loss if they didn't engage in self-generation while firms that didn't invest in self-generation would have reduced their outage loss by 2% - 24% if they had engaged in self generation. This chapter is also a single-authored paper. Given the above result, the study proposed a differential supply interruption to be followed by public authorities based on firms' degree of vulnerability. Stating differently, firms whose operation are more vulnerable to power outages should get preferential power supply advantage. This could be possible by arranging a binding contract between a vulnerable firms and power companies, so that power companies charge an optimal tariff for supplying secure power for vulnerable firms. In turn, firms should be compensated if the power companies fail to do so. This helps vulnerable firms expand their production without fearing the risk of power outage.

Over the last century, customers have become increasingly uncertain about how to be satisfied because of the growing complexity of their own needs. On the one hand, most standardized needs have been satisfied, whereas on the other hand, worldwide demand for intrinsically complex needs (such as health care and long-term care) has increased, especially because of population ageing. On the supply side, producing on the basis of an estimated foreseen demand has become increasingly difficult and customer uncertainty has become a cause of organizational inefficiency. Nevertheless, in the theories of the firm so far developed, the customer is still a missing player, confined to the position of 'rational agent'. This research discusses how organizational efficiency is impacted by customer uncertainty in taking consumption decisions when the needs are complex. The central issue is to understand when it is efficient for the organization to involve the uncertain customer in the production process and, accordingly, which organizational form is the most effective in managing such involvement. Today the lack of clarity regarding this theoretical issue has permitted, or even supported, an imprudent adoption of mass-customization in important sectors which gives customers the option of choosing exclusively from among standardized options, without suitable consideration for both the complexity of their needs and the organization required. My dissertation is organized into three chapters. The first chapter proposes a theoretical framework on the basis of the Modularity Theory of the Firm (Langlois and Robertson 1995; Langlois 2002, 2006; Baldwin and Clark, 2003; 2006), which allows for the identification of the most effective organizational types to face customer uncertainty. The second chapter studies the most efficient way to design and manage production processes in the presence of uncertain customer needs, implying the necessity to involve the customers themselves in the production process. The focus here is also on the design and management of long term care (LTC) services. And the third chapter, by adopting case study research methods for theory building (Eisenhardt, 1989, Yin 2003), in order to investigate the relationship between organizational and production efficiency, analyses five LTC organizations that belong to different categories of modularity and are characterized by different governance forms. Summarizing the results, the thesis firstly theorizes that cooperative governance (the internal organization of labour based on inclusion, participation, and horizontal relations) is the most effective to minimize dynamic transaction costs and the related unexpected production costs (damages, errors, waste of time, legal actions) thanks to developing capabilities related to how to satisfy customers' complex needs. Particularly, the accountability of workers supports a learning-by-doing process that allows for life-long learning and the necessary flexibility to adequately meet customers' needs. Secondly, the study proposes a blueprinting approach to service design and management, which allows for the separation of front/back office in order to improve management efficiency. This structure is particularly suited for supporting decision-making processes in a flat organizational structure (such as the cooperative one), as it clarifies the workflow processes and responsibilities. Thirdly, it empirically applies the theoretical results to situations of long-term care with customer uncertainty and shows how services should be designed in order to maintain a low level of unexpected production costs.

Productivity, i.e., the efficiency with which nations, industries and firms use resources to achieve economically valuable results, is perhaps the most important measure available to policy-makers to gauge the health of an economic system. Early empirical explorations based on country- or industry-level data relied on representative firm paradigms. However, the increasing availability of firm-level data has provided robust evidence for the existence and persistence of wide productivity differentials among firms. In particular, questions regarding what supports such wide heterogeneity, which factors matter most, whether factors influencing productivity can be controlled by firms or are purely external products of the operating environment and which policies can be used to boost productivity growth are all of primary importance. This thesis contributes to the empirical literature on firm productivity with three core papers. The first re-examines the slowdown in productivity in Italian manufacturing by studying the link between innovation, imitation and human capital, which sustained wide heterogeneity of firm productivity behind the aggregate flat productivity trend. The second paper extends analysis to the services sector, in particular to tourism. At a very disaggregated level, it identifies the various sources of differences in productive efficiency of hotels stemming from entrepreneurial and managerial factors, and external to firm factors. The third paper examines the effect of public policy in tourism. A methodological advance is proposed by defining an econometric framework, which allows us to identify and estimate not only the direct but also the indirect effects which public policies may have on hotel performance, in a dynamic treatment setting.

This Ph.D. project thesis is a collection of three autonomous works tied by a common focus, that is to inquire the role public sector – within the peculiar Italian context – may exert to improve firms’ performance, thus supporting the aggregate growth in country’s economy. The first two works relates to public procurement, the main tool within the demand-side policy measures, which is object of a revitalized interest in both policymakers and scholars. In the first work I investigate whether those Italian firms engaging in public procurement report a larger propensity to innovate with respect to their counterparts that exclusively target private customers, paying mainly at- tention on how any effect varies with the amount of public procurement a firm is engaged into. In the second work, which represents an extension of the previous one, the scope is enlarged in order to investigate whether municipal procurement, that is that promoted by Municipalities, affects firms (in terms of higher productivity) localized within the same municipal borders. This investigation grounds on a comprehensive dataset that merges the rich panel information about Italian firms – provided by RIL surveys – with more than a million of official administrative data on all the public tenders awarded in Italy between 2010-2018, provided by the Italian anti-corruption agency (ANAC). In the last work, the attention is shifted towards the way with whom firms manage their labor force to enhance their innovative performance. This work, which grounds its premises on the numerous reforms of labor market that followed one another in the last two decades, represents a first attempt with respect to the Italian context to look at three dimensions of numerical flexibility at the same time and to explore some potential channels capable to mediate the relation between numerical flexibility and innovation.

La tesi è formata da due capitoli su dinamica della distribuzione delle imprese e shock aggregati. Usando un modello ad imprese eterogenee, la tesi studia le fluttuazioni di ciclo economico dovute a shock alla tecnologia ed ai costi in entrata.
This dissertation collects two essays on firm size dynamics and aggregate shocks. By employing a model with heterogeneous firms, search frictions and endogenous entry/exit we investigate the business cycle dynamics of the firm size distribution by looking at entry cost and technology shocks. The thesis is divided into two chapters.\\ The first chapter explores how an increase in entry costs affects the size of new entrants and the concentration of employment according to firm size, along with its effects on macro-variables such as unemployment and the exit rate. To this aim we use a BVAR model to estimate the response of such variables to an entry cost shock, then we develop a heterogeneous-firm model with search frictions and endogenous entry/exit dynamics calibrated on data from Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) database to address our empirical results.\\ We find that positive entry cost shocks increase the average size of entrants and move employment shares toward the largest firms. These results reveal the role of entry costs' fluctuations in explaining the dynamics at business cycle horizons of both firm and employment share distributions according to size.\\ The second chapter perturbed the model with a technology shock to replicate the long-run differential of job destruction due to exit between small and large firms and its empirical response to technology shocks (estimated by a BVAR). Contrary to frameworks with \textit{exogenous} exit, the model is able to account for the volatility of exit and the differential of job destruction due to exit between small and large firms conditional to the technology shock. Moreover we find that not only entry but also exit is a viable amplification channel for the response of unemployment to the shock.\\

This thesis consists of three essays that examine the causal effects that income shocks have on firm and household dynamics. In the first chapter, I examine the role that income shocks have on the financial performance of small firms in Ecuador. I find that the effect on various measures of firm growth is significant, albeit temporary. The main contribution of this chapter to the literature is that it shows that the nature and duration of demand shocks, not just their magnitude, are an essential factor in explaining firm growth. In the second chapter, I examine the role that income shocks have on household expenditures on human capital and non-durable consumption using the menor cuantia process as identification strategy. Overall, I find that household expenditure is highly sensible to temporary income shocks. In the third chapter, we examine the role that income shocks have on four key areas of education: school attendance, educational expenditures, child labor, and competency level in mathematics. We find that a higher household income increases the odds of children attending school, increases schooling expenditures, decreases the odds of child labor, and increases the odds for children to reach a higher level of proficiency in mathematics. When we break down the average estimates across household types, we find that income shocks have almost no effect on school attendance and child labor for those households that rely on farming as their main source of income.

Management Compensation is a phenomenon of strong debate, both in the academic world and within the companies themselves in the relation between management and investors. This work develops this theme through a general introduction starting with the study of the literature, also focusing on the strong controversy regarding CEO compensation. In the following part there is a contextualization of the theme of the management compensation in the software industry with the analysis of the compensation policies of three leading companies in this sector: SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Considering the complexity of an appropriate design of the system and the many factors which influenced the settings, this project wants to analyse the compensation policies taking into account the differences regarding products, strategies, financial performance and corporate governance among the three firms. Using the disclosures coming from Integrated Reports, Proxy statements and Annual Reports, this work compares the situations in SAP, Oracle and Microsoft in order to understand their differences. It wants to try to analyse the discrepancies and understand if the policies are in line with the companies’ performance. Although the firms are consolidated companies, with continuous growth and leaders in the sector, the compensation policies are different in structure and therefore in the final remuneration. This leads to many considerations and discussion to which of the company applies the best policy.

Productivity, i.e., the efficiency with which nations, industries and firms use resources to achieve economically valuable results, is perhaps the most important measure available to policy-makers to gauge the health of an economic system. Early empirical explorations based on country- or industry-level data relied on representative firm paradigms. However, the increasing availability of firm-level data has provided robust evidence for the existence and persistence of wide productivity differentials among firms. In particular, questions regarding what supports such wide heterogeneity, which factors matter most, whether factors influencing productivity can be controlled by firms or are purely external products of the operating environment and which policies can be used to boost productivity growth are all of primary importance. This thesis contributes to the empirical literature on firm productivity with three core papers. The first re-examines the slowdown in productivity in Italian manufacturing by studying the link between innovation, imitation and human capital, which sustained wide heterogeneity of firm productivity behind the aggregate flat productivity trend. The second paper extends analysis to the services sector, in particular to tourism. At a very disaggregated level, it identifies the various sources of differences in productive efficiency of hotels stemming from entrepreneurial and managerial factors, and external to firm factors. The third paper examines the effect of public policy in tourism. A methodological advance is proposed by defining an econometric framework, which allows us to identify and estimate not only the direct but also the indirect effects which public policies may have on hotel performance, in a dynamic treatment setting.

It is not unknown that the evolution of firm theories has been developed along a path paved by an increasing awareness of the organizational structure importance. From the early “neoclassical” conceptualizations that intended the firm as a rational actor whose aim is to produce that amount of output, given the inputs at its disposal and in accordance to technological or environmental constraints, which maximizes the revenue (see Boulding, 1942 for a past mid century state of the art discussion) to the knowledge based theory of the firm (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka & Toyama, 2005), which recognizes in the firm a knnowledge creating entity, with specific organizational capabilities (Teece, 1996; Teece & Pisano, 1998) that allow to sustaine competitive advantages. Tracing back a map of the theory of the firm evolution, taking into account the several perspectives adopted in the history of thought, would take the length of many books. Because of that a more fruitful strategy is circumscribing the focus of the description of the literature evolution to one flow connected to a crucial question about the nature of firm’s behaviour and about the determinants of competitive advantages. In so doing I adopt a perspective that allows me to consider the organizational structure of the firm as an element according to which the different theories can be discriminated. The approach adopted starts by considering the drawbacks of the standard neoclassical theory of the firm. Discussing the most influential theoretical approaches I end up with a close examination of the knowledge based perspective of the firm. Within this perspective the firm is considered as a knowledge creating entity that produce and mange knowledge (Nonaka, Toyama, & Nagata, 2000; Nonaka & Toyama, 2005). In a knowledge intensive organization, knowledge is clearly embedded for the most part in the human capital of the individuals that compose such an organization. In a knowledge based organization, the management, in order to cope with knowledge intensive productions, ought to develop and accumulate capabilities that shape the organizational forms in a way that relies on “cross-functional processes, extensive delayering and empowerment” (Foss 2005, p.12). This mechanism contributes to determine the absorptive capacity of the firm towards specific technologies and, in so doing, it also shape the technological trajectories along which the firm moves. After having recognized the growing importance of the firm’s organizational structure in the theoretical literature concerning the firm theory, the subsequent point of the analysis is that of providing an overview of the changes that have been occurred at micro level to the firm’s organization of production. The economic actors have to deal with challenges posed by processes of internationalisation and globalization, increased and increasing competitive pressure of less developed countries on low value added production activities, changes in technologies and increased environmental turbulence and volatility. As a consequence, it has been widely recognized that the main organizational models of production that fitted well in the 20th century are now partially inadequate and processes aiming to reorganize production activities have been widespread across several economies in recent years. Recently, the emergence of a “new” form of production organization has been proposed both by scholars, practitioners and institutions: the most prominent characteristic of such a model is its recognition of the importance of employees commitment and involvement. As a consequence it is characterized by a strong accent on the human resource management and on those practices that aim to widen the autonomy and responsibility of the workers as well as increasing their commitment to the organization (Osterman, 1994; 2000; Lynch, 2007). This “model” of production organization is by many defined as High Performance Work System (HPWS). Despite the increasing diffusion of workplace practices that may be inscribed within the concept of HPWS in western countries’ companies, it is an hazard, to some extent, to speak about the emergence of a “new organizational paradigm”. The discussion about organizational changes and the diffusion of HPWP the focus cannot abstract from a discussion about the industrial relations systems, with a particular accent on the employment relationships, because of their relevance, in the same way as production organization, in determining two major outcomes of the firm: innovation and economic performances. The argument is treated starting from the issue of the Social Dialogue at macro level, both in an European perspective and Italian perspective. The model of interaction between the social parties has repercussions, at micro level, on the employment relationships, that is to say on the relations between union delegates and management or workers and management. Finding economic and social policies capable of sustaining growth and employment within a knowledge based scenario is likely to constitute the major challenge for the next generation of social pacts, which are the main social dialogue outcomes. As Acocella and Leoni (2007) put forward the social pacts may constitute an instrument to trade wage moderation for high intensity in ICT, organizational and human capital investments. Empirical evidence, especially focused on the micro level, about the positive relation between economic growth and new organizational designs coupled with ICT adoption and non adversarial industrial relations is growing. Partnership among social parties may become an instrument to enhance firm competitiveness. The outcome of the discussion is the integration of organizational changes and industrial relations elements within a unified framework: the HPWS. Such a choice may help in disentangling the potential existence of complementarities between these two aspects of the firm internal structure on economic and innovative performance. With the third chapter starts the more original part of the thesis. The data utilized in order to disentangle the relations between HPWS practices, innovation and economic performance refer to the manufacturing firms of the Reggio Emilia province with more than 50 employees. The data have been collected through face to face interviews both to management (199 respondents) and to union representatives (181 respondents). Coupled with the cross section datasets a further data source is constituted by longitudinal balance sheets (1994-2004). Collecting reliable data that in turn provide reliable results needs always a great effort to which are connected uncertain results. Data at micro level are often subjected to a trade off: the wider is the geographical context to which the population surveyed belong the lesser is the amount of information usually collected (low level of resolution); the narrower is the focus on specific geographical context, the higher is the amount of information usually collected (high level of resolution). For the Italian case the evidence about the diffusion of HPWP and their effects on firm performances is still scanty and usually limited to local level studies (Cristini, et al., 2003). The thesis is also devoted to the deepening of an argument of particular interest: the existence of complementarities between the HPWS practices. It has been widely shown by empirical evidence that when HPWP are adopted in bundles they are more likely to impact on firm’s performances than when adopted in isolation (Ichniowski, Prennushi, Shaw, 1997). Is it true also for the local production system of Reggio Emilia? The empirical analysis has the precise aim of providing evidence on the relations between the HPWS dimensions and the innovative and economic performances of the firm. As far as the first line of analysis is concerned it must to be stressed the fundamental role that innovation plays in the economy (Geroski & Machin, 1993; Stoneman & Kwoon 1994, 1996; OECD, 2005; EC, 2002). On this point the evidence goes from the traditional innovations, usually approximated by R&D investment expenditure or number of patents, to the introduction and adoption of ICT, in the recent years (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 2000). If innovation is important then it is critical to analyse its determinants. In this work it is hypothesised that organizational changes and firm level industrial relations/employment relations aspects that can be put under the heading of HPWS, influence the propensity to innovate in product, process and quality of the firm. The general argument may goes as follow: changes in production management and work organization reconfigure the absorptive capacity of the firm towards specific technologies and, in so doing, they shape the technological trajectories along which the firm moves; cooperative industrial relations may lead to smother adoption of innovations, because not contrasted by unions. From the first empirical chapter emerges that the different types of innovations seem to respond in different ways to the HPWS variables. The underlying processes of product, process and quality innovations are likely to answer to different firm’s strategies and needs. Nevertheless, it is possible to extract some general results in terms of the most influencing HPWS factors on innovative performance. The main three aspects are training coverage, employees involvement and the diffusion of bonuses. These variables show persistent and significant relations with all the three innovation types. The same do the components having such variables at their inside. In sum the aspects of the HPWS influence the propensity to innovate of the firm. At the same time, emerges a quite neat (although not always strong) evidence of complementarities presence between HPWS practices. In terns of the complementarity issue it can be said that some specific complementarities exist. Training activities, when adopted and managed in bundles, are related to the propensity to innovate. Having a sound skill base may be an element that enhances the firm’s capacity to innovate. It may enhance both the capacity to absorbe exogenous innovation and the capacity to endogenously develop innovations. The presence and diffusion of bonuses and the employees involvement also spur innovative propensity. The former because of their incentive nature and the latter because direct workers participation may increase workers commitment to the organizationa and thus their willingness to support and suggest inovations. The other line of analysis provides results on the relation between HPWS and economic performances of the firm. There have been a bulk of international empirical studies on the relation between organizational changes and economic performance (Black & Lynch 2001; Zwick 2004; Janod & Saint-Martin 2004; Huselid 1995; Huselid & Becker 1996; Cappelli & Neumark 2001), while the works aiming to capture the relations between economic performance and unions or industrial relations aspects are quite scant (Addison & Belfield, 2001; Pencavel, 2003; Machin & Stewart, 1990; Addison, 2005). In the empirical analysis the integration of the two main areas of the HPWS represent a scarcely exploited approach in the panorama of both national and international empirical studies. As remarked by Addison “although most analysis of workers representation and employee involvement/high performance work practices have been conducted in isolation – while sometimes including the other as controls – research is beginning to consider their interactions” (Addison, 2005, p.407). The analysis conducted exploiting temporal lags between dependent and covariates, possibility given by the merger of cross section and panel data, provides evidence in favour of the existence of HPWS practices impact on firm’s economic performance, differently measured. Although it does not seem to emerge robust evidence on the existence of complementarities among HPWS aspects on performances there is evidence of a general positive influence of the single practices. The results are quite sensible to the time lags, inducing to hypothesize that time varying heterogeneity is an important factor in determining the impact of organizational changes on economic performance. The implications of the analysis can be of help both to management and local level policy makers. Although the results are not simply extendible to other local production systems it may be argued that for contexts similar to the Reggio Emilia province, characterized by the presence of small and medium enterprises organized in districts and by a deep rooted unionism, with strong supporting institutions, the results and the implications here obtained can also fit well. However, a hope for future researches on the subject treated in the present work is that of collecting good quality information over wider geographical areas, possibly at national level, and repeated in time. Only in this way it is possible to solve the Gordian knot about the linkages between innovation, performance, high performance work practices and industrial relations.

It is not unknown that the evolution of firm theories has been developed along a path paved by an increasing awareness of the organizational structure importance. From the early “neoclassical” conceptualizations that intended the firm as a rational actor whose aim is to produce that amount of output, given the inputs at its disposal and in accordance to technological or environmental constraints, which maximizes the revenue (see Boulding, 1942 for a past mid century state of the art discussion) to the knowledge based theory of the firm (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka & Toyama, 2005), which recognizes in the firm a knnowledge creating entity, with specific organizational capabilities (Teece, 1996; Teece & Pisano, 1998) that allow to sustaine competitive advantages. Tracing back a map of the theory of the firm evolution, taking into account the several perspectives adopted in the history of thought, would take the length of many books. Because of that a more fruitful strategy is circumscribing the focus of the description of the literature evolution to one flow connected to a crucial question about the nature of firm’s behaviour and about the determinants of competitive advantages. In so doing I adopt a perspective that allows me to consider the organizational structure of the firm as an element according to which the different theories can be discriminated. The approach adopted starts by considering the drawbacks of the standard neoclassical theory of the firm. Discussing the most influential theoretical approaches I end up with a close examination of the knowledge based perspective of the firm. Within this perspective the firm is considered as a knowledge creating entity that produce and mange knowledge (Nonaka, Toyama, & Nagata, 2000; Nonaka & Toyama, 2005). In a knowledge intensive organization, knowledge is clearly embedded for the most part in the human capital of the individuals that compose such an organization. In a knowledge based organization, the management, in order to cope with knowledge intensive productions, ought to develop and accumulate capabilities that shape the organizational forms in a way that relies on “cross-functional processes, extensive delayering and empowerment” (Foss 2005, p.12). This mechanism contributes to determine the absorptive capacity of the firm towards specific technologies and, in so doing, it also shape the technological trajectories along which the firm moves. After having recognized the growing importance of the firm’s organizational structure in the theoretical literature concerning the firm theory, the subsequent point of the analysis is that of providing an overview of the changes that have been occurred at micro level to the firm’s organization of production. The economic actors have to deal with challenges posed by processes of internationalisation and globalization, increased and increasing competitive pressure of less developed countries on low value added production activities, changes in technologies and increased environmental turbulence and volatility. As a consequence, it has been widely recognized that the main organizational models of production that fitted well in the 20th century are now partially inadequate and processes aiming to reorganize production activities have been widespread across several economies in recent years. Recently, the emergence of a “new” form of production organization has been proposed both by scholars, practitioners and institutions: the most prominent characteristic of such a model is its recognition of the importance of employees commitment and involvement. As a consequence it is characterized by a strong accent on the human resource management and on those practices that aim to widen the autonomy and responsibility of the workers as well as increasing their commitment to the organization (Osterman, 1994; 2000; Lynch, 2007). This “model” of production organization is by many defined as High Performance Work System (HPWS). Despite the increasing diffusion of workplace practices that may be inscribed within the concept of HPWS in western countries’ companies, it is an hazard, to some extent, to speak about the emergence of a “new organizational paradigm”. The discussion about organizational changes and the diffusion of HPWP the focus cannot abstract from a discussion about the industrial relations systems, with a particular accent on the employment relationships, because of their relevance, in the same way as production organization, in determining two major outcomes of the firm: innovation and economic performances. The argument is treated starting from the issue of the Social Dialogue at macro level, both in an European perspective and Italian perspective. The model of interaction between the social parties has repercussions, at micro level, on the employment relationships, that is to say on the relations between union delegates and management or workers and management. Finding economic and social policies capable of sustaining growth and employment within a knowledge based scenario is likely to constitute the major challenge for the next generation of social pacts, which are the main social dialogue outcomes. As Acocella and Leoni (2007) put forward the social pacts may constitute an instrument to trade wage moderation for high intensity in ICT, organizational and human capital investments. Empirical evidence, especially focused on the micro level, about the positive relation between economic growth and new organizational designs coupled with ICT adoption and non adversarial industrial relations is growing. Partnership among social parties may become an instrument to enhance firm competitiveness. The outcome of the discussion is the integration of organizational changes and industrial relations elements within a unified framework: the HPWS. Such a choice may help in disentangling the potential existence of complementarities between these two aspects of the firm internal structure on economic and innovative performance. With the third chapter starts the more original part of the thesis. The data utilized in order to disentangle the relations between HPWS practices, innovation and economic performance refer to the manufacturing firms of the Reggio Emilia province with more than 50 employees. The data have been collected through face to face interviews both to management (199 respondents) and to union representatives (181 respondents). Coupled with the cross section datasets a further data source is constituted by longitudinal balance sheets (1994-2004). Collecting reliable data that in turn provide reliable results needs always a great effort to which are connected uncertain results. Data at micro level are often subjected to a trade off: the wider is the geographical context to which the population surveyed belong the lesser is the amount of information usually collected (low level of resolution); the narrower is the focus on specific geographical context, the higher is the amount of information usually collected (high level of resolution). For the Italian case the evidence about the diffusion of HPWP and their effects on firm performances is still scanty and usually limited to local level studies (Cristini, et al., 2003). The thesis is also devoted to the deepening of an argument of particular interest: the existence of complementarities between the HPWS practices. It has been widely shown by empirical evidence that when HPWP are adopted in bundles they are more likely to impact on firm’s performances than when adopted in isolation (Ichniowski, Prennushi, Shaw, 1997). Is it true also for the local production system of Reggio Emilia? The empirical analysis has the precise aim of providing evidence on the relations between the HPWS dimensions and the innovative and economic performances of the firm. As far as the first line of analysis is concerned it must to be stressed the fundamental role that innovation plays in the economy (Geroski & Machin, 1993; Stoneman & Kwoon 1994, 1996; OECD, 2005; EC, 2002). On this point the evidence goes from the traditional innovations, usually approximated by R&D investment expenditure or number of patents, to the introduction and adoption of ICT, in the recent years (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 2000). If innovation is important then it is critical to analyse its determinants. In this work it is hypothesised that organizational changes and firm level industrial relations/employment relations aspects that can be put under the heading of HPWS, influence the propensity to innovate in product, process and quality of the firm. The general argument may goes as follow: changes in production management and work organization reconfigure the absorptive capacity of the firm towards specific technologies and, in so doing, they shape the technological trajectories along which the firm moves; cooperative industrial relations may lead to smother adoption of innovations, because not contrasted by unions. From the first empirical chapter emerges that the different types of innovations seem to respond in different ways to the HPWS variables. The underlying processes of product, process and quality innovations are likely to answer to different firm’s strategies and needs. Nevertheless, it is possible to extract some general results in terms of the most influencing HPWS factors on innovative performance. The main three aspects are training coverage, employees involvement and the diffusion of bonuses. These variables show persistent and significant relations with all the three innovation types. The same do the components having such variables at their inside. In sum the aspects of the HPWS influence the propensity to innovate of the firm. At the same time, emerges a quite neat (although not always strong) evidence of complementarities presence between HPWS practices. In terns of the complementarity issue it can be said that some specific complementarities exist. Training activities, when adopted and managed in bundles, are related to the propensity to innovate. Having a sound skill base may be an element that enhances the firm’s capacity to innovate. It may enhance both the capacity to absorbe exogenous innovation and the capacity to endogenously develop innovations. The presence and diffusion of bonuses and the employees involvement also spur innovative propensity. The former because of their incentive nature and the latter because direct workers participation may increase workers commitment to the organizationa and thus their willingness to support and suggest inovations. The other line of analysis provides results on the relation between HPWS and economic performances of the firm. There have been a bulk of international empirical studies on the relation between organizational changes and economic performance (Black & Lynch 2001; Zwick 2004; Janod & Saint-Martin 2004; Huselid 1995; Huselid & Becker 1996; Cappelli & Neumark 2001), while the works aiming to capture the relations between economic performance and unions or industrial relations aspects are quite scant (Addison & Belfield, 2001; Pencavel, 2003; Machin & Stewart, 1990; Addison, 2005). In the empirical analysis the integration of the two main areas of the HPWS represent a scarcely exploited approach in the panorama of both national and international empirical studies. As remarked by Addison “although most analysis of workers representation and employee involvement/high performance work practices have been conducted in isolation – while sometimes including the other as controls – research is beginning to consider their interactions” (Addison, 2005, p.407). The analysis conducted exploiting temporal lags between dependent and covariates, possibility given by the merger of cross section and panel data, provides evidence in favour of the existence of HPWS practices impact on firm’s economic performance, differently measured. Although it does not seem to emerge robust evidence on the existence of complementarities among HPWS aspects on performances there is evidence of a general positive influence of the single practices. The results are quite sensible to the time lags, inducing to hypothesize that time varying heterogeneity is an important factor in determining the impact of organizational changes on economic performance. The implications of the analysis can be of help both to management and local level policy makers. Although the results are not simply extendible to other local production systems it may be argued that for contexts similar to the Reggio Emilia province, characterized by the presence of small and medium enterprises organized in districts and by a deep rooted unionism, with strong supporting institutions, the results and the implications here obtained can also fit well. However, a hope for future researches on the subject treated in the present work is that of collecting good quality information over wider geographical areas, possibly at national level, and repeated in time. Only in this way it is possible to solve the Gordian knot about the linkages between innovation, performance, high performance work practices and industrial relations.

2015 - 2016
The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the debate on the relationship between innovation and internationalization. After providing in Chapter 1 a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and empirical debate on this relationship, we investigate in chapter 2 the impact of being involved in international market on innovation disentangling different strategies of foreign activity in order to add empirical evidence to the branch of the literature on learning-to-innovate-by-internationalization (LIBI) (Chapter 2). Finally, in Chapter 3, we examine the role of persistency in both innovation and export activity to see if the long-lasting involvements ensure higher returns on productivity. We will go through these different steps using data on Italian manufacturing firms covering an eight year time-span (1998-2006), drawn from three waves (VIII, IX, X) of the AIDA Capitalia Survey of Manufacturing firms. Going more in detail, in Chapter 1 we go through the debate going on in the literature in recent decades analyzing the change in theoretical perspective from an industry level approach that was in the vogue up to the end of ‘90s, to the growing importance of firms’ heterogeneity that has been introduced at start of the century. This change in perspective has been reflected in the empirical literature and we will see the different branches and the main contributions to them. The contribution to the literature we want to give in Chapter 2 is not only focused on exports as in the majority of the works in this field (see for surveys Wagner 2007, 2012; and, for Italy, Gattai, 2015) but the novelty of our approach is to consider different level of involvements in international activities: export, FDI and outsourcing. Moreover, we measure the impact of these strategies on different kinds of innovation: first of all, we will see if and how each strategy influences innovation performance as a whole, then we distinguish between product and process innovation. Our estimation models have been carried out through complementary methodologies: starting, first of all, FIRM PERFORMANCES, INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES AND INNOVATION. 
 A MICRO LEVEL ANALYSIS ON ITALIAN FIRMS. with probit estimation, then moving to propensity score matching estimation to cope with endogeneity issues, and finally also using Heckman correction to control for any selection bias due to unobservable. What comes out from our results is that: 1) both exports and FDIs have a positive impact on innovation and the latter strategy has also an higher impact on the probability of introducing innovation if we consider any type of innovation; 2) when we consider product innovation, exporting and investing abroad raise the probability of introducing such kind of innovation; 3) outsourcing, instead, shows positive and significant coefficient when we consider process innovation suggesting that firms contracting out to other partners some stages of the production may introduce some innovation to optimize the whole process. Then, since destination of international activities may influence the outcome, we also distinguish countries of destination in three different classes (EU15, Industrialized non-European countries and non-industrialized non-European countries) and we find, that exporters and FDI makers have higher probability to introduce innovation if they undertake their activities in countries outside the Europe, but, in particular and somehow surprisingly, exporting towards non-European and less developed countries raise the probability of introducing product innovation since firms have to face greater consumer heterogeneity in less-developed countries than in more developed ones, since Italian customers have more similar tastes to customers from developed countries so firms have to modify their products to meet foreign tastes. In Chapter 3 we change our perspective considering both innovation and internationalization strategies jointly and changing the variable of interest analyzing how the persistence in innovation activity influences the performance of the firm (measured through the total factor productivity à la Levinsohn and Petrin) and if this relationship changes if firms export persistently or do not. Using OLS and then a two step system Arellano-Bond GMM, we at first consider the effects of these strategies separately, and then, we consider them jointly. What we find is that when we consider the strategies separately they do not seem to allow firms to gain productivity. Our estimation results are in favour of the hypotheses of learning-by-exporting and learning-by-doing: persistent innovation efforts must be associated with a permanent presence on foreign markets since firms that persistently innovate and persistently export have better results in terms of productivity than persistently exporting firms that do not innovate persistently and than firms that do not export persistently. [edited by author]
Obiettivo fondamentale della tesi è fornire un contributo al dibattito sulla relazione tra innovazione ed internazionalizzazione. Dopo aver fornito nel Capitolo 1 una esaustiva e completa rassegna della letteratura (teorica ed empirica) sull’argomento, nel Capitolo 2 passeremo, considerando diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione, ad analizzare l’impatto della partecipazione ad attività internazionali sull’innovazioneper fornire ulteriore evidenza empirica al filone della letteratura noto come “learning-by-internationalization” (LBI). Un ulteriore importante obiettivo di tale capitolo è considerare se le destinazioni di attività internazionali influiscono sui ritorni in termini di innovazione per le imprese. Nel capitolo conclusivo dell’elaborato, infine, esamineremo il ruolo della persistenza, sia nelle decisioni di innovazione che nell’attività di export, per vedere se un più duraturo coinvolgimento in tali attività (solo in una o in entrambi) possa assicurare un maggiore ritorno in termini di produttività. Tutte le analisi, volte al raggiungimento degli obiettivi sopracitati, sono state condotte attraverso l’utilizzo di dati sulle imprese manifatturiere italiane, osservate per un periodo di tempo di 8 anni, forniti da tre diverse wave (VIII, IX, X) dei dati Unicredit-Capitalia (19982006). Approfondendo più nel dettaglio i contenuti dei vari capitoli che compongono l’elaborato, nel Capitolo 1, affrontiamo il dibattito, ancora aperto, che ha attraversato la letteratura nelle ultime due decadi, mettendo in risalto come progressivamente, l’oggetto di analisi si sia progressivamente spostato da un approccio più industry-level – più in voga fino alla fine degli anni ’90 del secolo scorso – verso una sempre crescente attenzione al ruolo centrale che hanno le caratteristiche specifiche delle imprese e la loro eterogeneità. Il contributo del secondo capitolo di questo elaborato, invece, non è incentrato solo sull’importanza delle esportazioni, come la maggior parte dei lavori in questo campo (per delle rassegne esaustive vedere Wagner 2007, 2012; e, per l’Italia, Gattai, 2015); uno degli FIRM PERFORMANCES, INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES AND INNOVATION. 
 A MICRO LEVEL ANALYSIS ON ITALIAN FIRMS. elementi di principale novità è aver considerato congiuntamente tre diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione: esportazioni, investimenti diretti esteri (IDE) e outsourcing. In questo capitolo, inoltre, la dimensione per valutare la performance dell’impresa e, quindi, il diverso impatto delle diverse strategie di internazionalizzazione, è l’innovazione (che noi consideriamo sia senza distinguere tra le diverse tipologie, sia anche solo come innovazione di prodotto). Le stime di questo capitolo sono state condotte attraverso l’utilizzo di tecniche econometriche complementari: partendo dall’utilizzo di stime con variabili dipendenti binarie, in particolare di probit con random effects, implementeremo il propensity score matching per affrontare i problemi di enodgeneità e di “selection bias on observables”; infine, attraverso l’utilizzo della procedura di Heckman, controlleremo eventuali “selection bias due to unobservables”. I risultati principali di questo capitolo sono: 1) sia le esportazioni che gli IDE hanno un effetto positivo sulla probabilità delle imprese di introdurre innovazione e gli IDE hanno anche un effetto maggiore, se consideriamo l’innovazione senza distinguerne le tipologie; 2) se consideriamo, invece, l’introduzione di innovazioni di prodotto, anche in questo caso, le imprese coinvolte in tale tipo di attività hanno un probabilità maggiore di innovare se confrontate con le rispettive controparti non attive sui mercati internazionali; 3) l’outsourcing, invece, mostra un coefficiente positivo e significativo solo nel caso dell’innovazione di processo, suggerendo che le imprese che esternalizzano alcune fasi della produzione possono avere un ritorno in termini di innovazione che consentirebbe loro di migliorare l’intero processo produttivo. Dato che le destinazioni delle attività internazionali possono avere effetti differenti sull’innovazione, le raggrupperemo in 3 differenti classi (i Paesi che fanno parte dell’Europa a 15, Paesi non europei industrializzati, Paesi non europei meno industrializzati). I nostri risultati sottolineano come le imprese esportatrici e che investono all’estero abbiano una maggiore probabilità, se comparate con le loro controparti non attive sui mercati internazionali, di introdurre innovazioni se le loro attività sono rivolte a Paesi al di fuori dell’Europa a 15. In particolare, risultato forse inaspettato, esportare verso Paesi non appartenenti all’Europa a 15 e meno sviluppati, sembra garantire una maggiore probabilità di introdurre innovazioni di prodotto. Questo risultato sembra sottolineare come le imprese che si rivolgono a tali mercati, a causa di una maggiore eterogeneità delle preferenze dei mercati di destinazione rispetto al mercato domestico italiano, debbano fare uno sforzo maggiore in termini di innovazione per rendere appetibili i propri prodotti. Nel terzo ed ultimo capitolo della tesi, analizzeremo la relazione tra innovazione e internazionalizzazione sotto una diversa prospettiva. Considereremo, infatti, congiuntamente, le scelte strategiche sia in termini di innovazione che di internazionalizzazione, cambiando anche la variabile di interesse con cui misuriamo la performance delle imprese: la produttività totale dei fattori á la Levinsohn and Petrin. Oggetto di interesse di questo capitolo, in particolare, è analizzare se le performance delle imprese cambiano se le imprese intraprendono separatamente o congiuntamente le due strategie e, inoltre, se portarle avanti nel tempo in maniera continua ha effetti positivi. Analizzeremo, prima singolarmente, poi congiuntamente le diverse scelte strategiche attraverso l’utilizzo prima di un OLS e poi di un two-step system GMM á la Arellano-Bond. Quello che emerge dalla nostra analisi è che quando consideriamo le strategie separatamente, queste non sembrano assicurare alle imprese vantaggi in termini di produttività, ma, a conferma delle ipotesi di learning-by-exporting e di learning-by-doing, le imprese che innovano costantemente nel tempo devono associare anche una costante attività di export per avere benefici. Imprese che intraprendono una sola attività, infatti, anche se costantemente nel tempo, non sembrano invece avere ritorni positivi in termini di produttività. [a cura dell'autore]
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After a comprehensive review of the literature on Incubators and Accelerators, we observe that new types of acceleration programs are emerging: The Accelerator Programs for Analog Firms (APAFs) or accelerator programs for non-internet oriented firms. In other words, acceleration programs for businesses in which the hardware component is fundamental, in which digital and analogue are combined to create unique products. Artigenous or Makers who exploit digital and traditional tools in order to propose innovative products to the market. These new accelerators possess a diversified revenue model, often focus on a specific vertical, integrate themselves more into the ecosystem, and work closely with governments and corporations. The challenge, however, is to understand their distinctive characteristics and profiles geared towards reinforcing business start-ups. How do accelerators for non-internet startup operate as a new generation incubation model and how do they differ from existing traditional accelerator programs? This inductive study investigates 5 accelerators across Europe, Asia and U.S.A and adopts a design lens to identify the APAFs main distinctive characteristics. We contribute to the incubation and acceleration literature by extending recognition of the heterogeneity of acceleration programs, by delineating the Accelerator Programs for Analog Firms as a distinctive incubation model. Finally, by considering the worldwide best practices we propose our APAF framework that allows companies to adapt to “The Third Industrial Revolution” and create new jobs.

Enterprise Risk Management rappresenta l'inizio di una rivoluzione del campo del risk management. Il modello permette di integrare la gestione dei rischi aziendali con i processi decisionali a livello corporate, quali business planning e strategic planning; inoltre, consente di coinvolgere il Board of Directors nella Risk Governance attraverso la definizione di politiche e linee guida (risk management policy) coerenti con il risk appetite, che vengono quindi diffuse nell'intera organizzazione. Partendo dal presupposto che il ruolo della Corporate Governance in ERM è la componente critica per l'implementazione efficace ed efficiente del modello, questo lavoro si propone di studiare l'impatto delle componenti della Corporate Governance sull'efficacia del processo di ERM e sulla conseguente variazione del grado di assunzione del rischio da parte delle non-financial firms presenti nell'indice STOXX Europe Large 200.

Globalization has enhanced the integration of economies and markets leading to a new competitive world. In this scenario of change also the management of work has been shaped. It’s interesting to understand the important role that human resource management plays, especially in global companies. Also, a technological revolution has been fuelled by the globalization process, ICTs are now easily accessible and can enhance the competitive advantage of firms in various way. One way that needs to be considered is the working environment as they facilitate communications and the transportation of data across companies. For what concerns HRM all these changes lead to a new way of managing people, HRM in the digital era has to face several challenges that are represented by: digital employees, digital word and digital employee management. What is important in this scenario of ICTs adoption is the level of technological awareness and knowledge of workers inside companies. Companies could rely on different kind of teams for the development of projects, among these there are: permanent teams, temporary teams, project teams, functional teams and virtual teams. Technology has enabled virtual teams to work together even if members live in different countries or are far away from each other. In this sense Virtual teams (VTs) represent the answer to an increase technological and globalized business world that needs to increase flexibility, productivity and dynamism. They present a great number of advantages but at the same time they could present also some cons, infact, by taking together people from different backgrounds and cultures opportunities for non-conformance and dysfunctional activities are present and tacit knowledge is not easily transferible among members. HRM should assess some precise competences that team members need to possess in order to lead to a successful outcome of the virtual team, among these self-related competences and team context-related competences. HRM should contribute to the enhancement of virtual teams by building an appropriate architecture able to ease the flow of knowledge and communication. In this scenario collaborative software play a central role in facilitating communication among members of virtual teams and represent a necessary tool that will be highly used for group decision making. Critical factors for the success of virtual teams are, indubitably, human resource policies, that should support working virtually and reward people in a fair way, but it’s also important the technical support for working remotely. Successful virtual teams are made of employees that are well trained and master ICTs, plus they manage to leverage cross-cultural differences. This thesis has the aim of assessing virtual team's related literature with the purpose of finding important aspects that should be in place in virtual teams in order to correctly exploit their advantages, with a particular focus on technology and collaborative software adoption.