Alessandro Viviani

Competitiveness and productivity: a case study of Italian firms

The purpose of this article is to obtain a synthetic measure of the multi-dimensional concept of firm competitiveness and to analyse the role of different factors, such as productivity, firm size and cluster of industries, for determining firm competitiveness in Italy. An adequate firm-specific data set is constructed from balance sheets by using imputation methods for handling missing values. The synthetic measure of competitiveness is obtained using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, then a Tobit model is considered to measure the influence of different factors on the measured competitiveness. The results obtained are very interesting and coherent with the characteristics of the Italian firms.

Learning-by-Exporting and Productivity: Evidences from a Panel of Manufacturing Firms

This paper investigates the dynamics of productivity experienced by firms that start to exporting. The effect of entering into international markets is disentangled by the self-selection component and its empirical distribution is evaluated. Results show that the impact on productivity of moving from the status of non-exporter to the status of exporter is different at different sections of the productivity distribution.