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Plain English Summary COVID-19 has imposed restrictions on labor mobility and this turns out to be relevant for productivity and economic growth. Business visits (BVs) are a proper proxy (unique information is taken from the US National Business Travel Association) to measure short-term mobility. Sectoral data in 14 countries over the period 1998-2013 are used. Results do reveal that BVs have a positive impact on labor productivity. However, this effect is more relevant in those sectors and economies at a lower stage of productivity evolution, i.e., the lower the initial productivity level, the larger the effect of BVs on productivity. Therefore, BVs play a relevant role in sectors and countries lagging behind in terms of productivity. Policy makers should foster, in the post-pandemic recovery, short-term labor mobility through adequate incentives and tax exemptions, particularly in those sectors where BVs are less frequent and where productivity growth is below the average.The restrictions on labor mobility imposed in the COVID-19 pandemic heighten the need to review in detail the role of mobility in improving productivity and fostering economic growth. In this study, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of business visits (BVs) understood as a productivity-enhancing intrapreneurial strategy, using the most extensive set of data available, covering 33 sectors and 14 countries during the period 1998-2013. Our database merges unique information on expenditures on BVs by sector, country, and year, sourced from the US National Business Travel Association, with OECD and World Bank productivity data. We find that BVs raise labor productivity in a significant way, but short-term labor mobility exhibits decreasing returns, being more crucial in those firms, sectors, and countries characterized by less mobility and by lower productivity performances.

In this work, we test the employment impact of distinct types of innovative investments using a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 2002-2013. Our GMM-SYS estimates generate various results, which are partially in contrast with the extant literature. Indeed, estimations carried out on the entire sample do not provide statistically significant evidence of the expected labor-friendly nature of innovation. More in detail, neither R&D nor investment in innovative machineries and equipment (the so-called embodied technological change, ETC) turn out to have any significant employment effect. However, the job-creation impact of R&D expenditures becomes highly significant when the focus is limited to the high-tech firms. On the other hand - and interestingly - ETC exhibits its labor-saving nature when SMEs are singled out.

This article explores the employment impact of innovation activity, taking into account both R&D expenditures and embodied technological change (ETC). We use a novel panel data set covering 265 innovative Italian firms over the period 1998-2010. The main outcome from the proposed fixed-effect estimations is a labor-friendly nature of total innovation expenditures; however, this positive effect is barely significant when the sole in-house R&D expenditures are considered and fades away when ETC is included as a proxy for innovation activities. Moreover, the positive employment impacts of innovation activities and R&D expenditures are totally due to firms operating in high-tech industries and large companies, while no job creation due to technical change is detectable in traditional sectors and SMEs.

Fil: D’Annolfo, Raffaele. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Italia. Fil: Gemmill-Herren, Barbara. Prescott College. Estados Unidos. Fil: Amudavi, David. Biovision Africa Trust. Kenia. Fil: Shiraku, Hudson. Biovision Africa Trust. Kenia. Fil: Piva, Mariacristina. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Italia. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. There is a need for scaling-up agroecology to promote sustainable agriculture at global level. Although, recent studies show that agroecological approaches can achieve both high yields and profits compared with conventional systems, the performance of other socioeconomic indicators remains unknown. This study has two objectives (i) identify the main characteristics of small-scale producers who represent the target-groups of the SDG 2; (ii) provide a comparison between push–pull and conventional farming systems of maize production to explore and possibly implement sustainable systems. In collaboration with Biovision Africa Trust, a participatory assessment framework was implemented in Western Kenya. Twenty-three farmers were selected and data were analysed showing that the push–pull contributes to social/cultural and natural/ecological capitals. In particular, push–pull farmers are more focused on socially oriented groups (75%); moreover, they cultivate smaller plots (1.9 ha) compared to conventional farmers (3.1 ha) without showing a reduction in profitability. The benefits of adopting push–pull system indicated by farmers (e.g. diminished Striga weed) are consistent with the advantages reported in relevant scientific literature. Considering the explorative nature of this study, the article makes a key contribution by pointing towards important questions for future research on agroecology in Sub-Saharan African countries.

We investigate whether labor mobility can be a distinct source of growth by studying the productivity impact of business visits (BVs), vis-à-vis that of other well-known drivers of productivity enhancement. Our analysis uses an unbalanced panel—covering on average 16 sectors per year in ten countries during the period 1998–2011—which combines unique and novel data on BVs sourced from the US National Business Travel Association with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on R&D and capital formation. We find that mobility through BVs is an effective mechanism to improve productivity, being about half that obtained by investing in R&D. This relevant finding invites viewing short-term mobility as a strategic mechanism and prospective policy tool to overcome productivity slowdowns and foster economic growth.

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the implications that complementary assets needed for the formation of start-ups - proxied by the ease of access to financial resources - have on the innovative efforts of incumbent firms. In particular, we develop a theoretical model, highlighting a strategic in- centive effect by which the innovative efforts of incumbent firms are decreasing in the availability of the complementary assets needed for the creation of a start- up. The empirical relevance of this effect is investigated by using firm level data drawn from the third Italian Community Innovation Survey covering the period 1998-2000. The results of our empirical analysis support our theory-based insights.

Risk behavior can be capricious and may vary from month to month. We study 62 clients of a private bank in Northern Italy. The individuals are of special interest for several reasons. As active traders, they manage the value-at-risk (VaR) of a portion of their wealth portfolios. In addition, they act alone, i.e., without input from a financial adviser. Based onVaR-statistics, we find that, in general, the subjects become more risk-averse after suffering losses and more risk-seeking after experiencing gains. The monthly gains and losses that alter investor risk behavior represent true changes in wealth but are “on paper” only, i.e., not immediately realized. Our results allow several interpretations, but they are not at odds with a house money effect, or the possibility that overconfident investors trade on illusions. Rapidly shifting risk behavior in fast response to unstable circumstances weakens individual risk tolerance as a deep parameter and key construct of finance theory.

This paper builds upon Pellegrino et al. (Struct Chang Econ Dyn 23:329–340, 2012) further analysing the determinants of product innovation in Italian young innovative companies (YICs) by looking at in-house and external RD however, YICs turn out to be less in-house R&D-based and, unlike their mature counterparts, more dependent on external sources of knowledge. While this outcome corroborates and further reinforce what found—using a different methodology—in Pellegrino et al. (Struct Chang Econ Dyn 23:329–340, 2012), in this study, other entrepreneurial attitudes such as the ability to cooperate with other firms in producing innovation or the capacity to develop significant organizational changes are also investigated. The results of the econometric estimations show that these attitudes turn out to be key innovative strategies in the incumbent firms but, in some specific cases (such as for the ability to cooperate), appear to be far less important in the YICs. These results are somehow worrying, since they show that Italian innovative entrepreneurs are mostly driven by routinized rather than creative strategies.

The literature has pointed to different causes to explain the productivity gap between the EU and the US in the last decades. This paper tests the hypothesis that the lower European productivity performance in comparison with the US can be explained not only by a lower level of corporate R&D investment but also by a lower capacity to translate R&D investment into productivity gains. The proposed microeconometric estimates are based on a unique longitudinal database covering the period 1990-2008 and comprising 1,809 US and EU companies for a total of 16,079 observations. Consistent with previous literature, we find robust evidence of a significant impact of R&D on productivity; however, using different estimation techniques, the R&D coefficients for the US firms always turn out to be significantly higher. To see to what extent these transatlantic differences in the R&D/productivity relationship may be related to the different sectoral structures in the US and the EU, we differentiated the analysis by sectors. The result is that both in manufacturing, services and high-tech manufacturing sectors US firms are more able to translate their R&D investments into productivity increases.

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro-longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labor productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance, and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low-tech to the medium- and high-tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high-tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low-tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low-tech sectors should support overall capital formation

Previous empirical literature has tested the demand-pull hypothesis and found that innovation may be driven by output. Using a balanced panel of 216 Italian manufacturing firms (1995-2000) and checking for the path-dependent nature of R&D, we find a role of sales in inducing R&D. However, the demand-pull effect plays a varying role for different sub-samples of firms. Exporting firms, liquidity-constrained firms, not subsidised firms and those not heading a group, seem to be sensitive to sales in deciding R&D. These results have been obtained using a Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected estimator, a recent panel-data technique suitable for small samples.

The microeconomic empirical literature devoted to the link between innovation and employment tends to suggest that technological change has a positive effect on jobs, at least at the firm-level. The main purpose of this paper is to see whether this result still holds in a situation where intermediate technologies are implemented mainly through non R&D expenditures, as in Italian manufacturing. Applying GMM-SYS to an employment equation augmented for technology and using a unique longitudinal dataset of 575 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1992–1997, this paper finds a significant – although small – positive relationship between innovation and employment.

Many empirical studies have shown how technological change, organisational change and globalisation can be alternatively (or jointly) seen as causes of skill bias. In this paper, after discussing some evidence on the G7 countries which shows a clear upskilling trend in manufacturing industries over the 1980s, an illustrative example is provided.The panel analysis of a sample of 488 Italian manufacturing firms shows how the upskilling trend of employment is a function of the reorganisational strategy adopted by firms, while technological change and FDI seem to play negligible roles.

The job creation effect of business R&D is tested applying the dynamic LSDVC estimator to a longitudinal database covering 677 European companies over the period 1990–2008. Job creation is detected in services and high-tech manufacturing, but not in traditional sectors.

Using a panel of 211 Italian manufacturing firms for 1995–2001 and the Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected (LSDVC) estimator recently discussed in the econometric literature, it is shown that demand-pull innovation is particularly significant in liquidity-constrained companies in both the short run and long run.