Concetto Paolo Vinci

Education and fertility: an investigation into Italian families

In this paper we analyse the correlation between the level of education and the number of children in Italy. We select 10,720 Italian families from the 2004-2007 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. Our dependent variable is represented by the number of children ever born to each respondent. Since the number of children ever born is a count variable, Poisson regression is the suitable statistical procedure used to conduct the empirical analysis. First, we estimate the correlation between the female’s education and her number of children, and then we use also partner’s education to take into account the family dimension. Furthermore, in the context of fertility, zero observations might be due either to the choice not to have children or to impossibility to become a mother. For this reason, we adopt also a more appropriate tool, that is a Zero-Inflated Poisson regression. From the empirical results, we may observe a significant negative correlation between the level of education and the number of children.

R&D SPILLOVERS AND PRODUCTIVITY IN ITALIAN MANUFACTURING FIRMS

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between Research and Development (R&D) spillovers and productivity. To this aim, we develop a non-overlapping generation model to evidence the theoretical idea of the spillovers between firms and then we implement an empirical investigation based on data from 9th and 10th Survey on Italian Manufacturing Firms (IMM) conducted by Capitalia to test for this idea. The results provide evidence of higher productivity in R&D and skill intensive industries and this can be interpreted as the signal of the relevance of spillover effects. Indeed, in-house R&D does not capture all aspects of innovation, which often occurs via other channels, especially in SMEs. Small and medium firms, such as Italian firms, are much more able to innovate by exploiting knowledge created outside of them. Thus, the results of our paper suggest that R&D spillovers reinforce in-house R&D in affecting SMEs productivity. Moreover, the contribution of this paper is also to stress the importance of skill composition of the labour force in the innovation process of firms.

TECHNOLOGICAL SPILLOVERS THROUGH A PATENT CITATION ANALYSIS

The aim of this paper is to analyse the pattern of knowledge flows as evidenced by the patent citations in three economic areas: USA, Japan and Europe. In each economic area, we exploit information from two international patent offices data, the United States Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) data and the European Patent Office (EPO) data. In this way, we can investigate the link between the technological proximity and knowledge spillovers for 240 international firms. In particular, the contribution to the existing literature is twofold: First, we use an international sample so that we can compare the empirical results among different economic markets; second, we explore the robustness of results with respect to patent system features. In order to compute the technological proximity, we consider both the symmetrical measure and asymmetrical one. The empirical results indicate that there is a statistically significant correlation between technological proximity and knowledge spillovers measured by patent citations and that these results are robust with respect to patent office data used in the analysis.