Marco Corsino

R&D, firm size and incremental product innovation

This article addresses an issue that is debated in the economics of innovation literature, namely the existence of increasing returns to R&D expenditures and firm size, in product innovation. It explores further how the firms structural characteristics and contextual factors affect the sustained introduction of new components over a relatively long time period. Taking advantage of an original and unique database comprising information on new product announcements by leading semiconductor producers, we show that: (i) decreasing returns to size and R&D expenditures characterize the innovation production function of the sampled firms; (ii) producers operating a larger product portfolio exhibit a higher propensity to introduce new products than their specialized competitors; (iii) aging has positive bearings on the firms ability to innovate.

Il ruolo della dimensione e dell’età nella crescita occupazionale delle PMI italiane

The paper empirically investigates gross job flows and the growth patterns of limited liability companies in Italy in 1996-2004, using original data on workforces and other company traits. The analysis shows that the phenomenon of regression to the mean only partially explains the tendency of small firms to grow at a faster pace than large organizations. The analysis of gross job flow indicates that the extent of job creation and job destruction shrunk in the aftermath of the economic downturn in 2001 and that the labour market was less efficient in allocating job opportunities. The econometric analysis shows that size has a negative impact on the net employment growth of a company, even though the negative correlation disappears among units with more than twenty-four employees. Firms with a history of maximum fourteen years outperform the average firm in the sample, while, conversely, the growth of companies is not influenced by their age if these have been in business for fifteen years or more, in fact it can even be a burden among the oldest firms in the sample.

Management Practices, Environmental Conditions and Productive Efficiency in the Service Industry. An Empirical Study of the Hotel Industry in Trentino

The hotel industry shows a wide dispersion of productive efficiency. The paper tries to isolate the exogenous determinants of the observedproductivity levels from factors related to corporate management. Among the exogenous determinants, demand conditions and the varying degree of attractiveness of tourism destinations play a central role. To assess how these factors influence the productivity of hotels we apply the metafrontier approach, a recent development of the Data Envelopment Analysis. The method allows identifying two components of the performance of each hotel: the distance of each unit from the local technological frontier and a metatechnology ratio that captures how far the local frontier is from the global one. Using an original database built by the statistical office of the Autonomous Province of Trento, the authors gauge the contribution of both components to the overall performance of hotels operating in 14 tourism destinations of the region. Results show that a large share of variability in productivity levels is due to the within component of each area; i.e., productivity differences in the same area are wider than differences between areas. This result holds even after controlling for quality differences across hotels, thus suggesting that organization and management practices are a major source of the observed heterogeneity.