Economia e Politica Industriale

Our paper provides a novel and in-depth analysis of the technological trends, geographic distribution, and business-level dynamics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in the European Union from patent- and firm-level perspectives. We do so via the analysis of patents filed at the European Patent Office between 1985 and 2014. We employ a new matched patent-firm data set provided by the Bureau Van Dijk: ORBIS-IP. We find evidence of a surge in the patenting activity related to the 4IR in the past three decades, particularly in networked devices. Our results also suggest that firms filing 4IR patents have become progressively younger on average. At the same time, we find a steady growth in the average number of 4IR patent applications filed yearly by each company. Further variance decompositions show that the surge in 4IR patent applications is mainly explained by incumbent firms filing more 4IR patent applications over time, rather than new entrants progressively populating the 4IR world. Finally, we uncover a general trend emerging at the firm level, whereby firms tend to specialise in a few technological areas and avoid differentiation.

Depending on the firm’s resources and capabilities, international distribution strategies may lead to either high market control (commercial subsidiaries) or flexibility and speed (collaborative or independent forms) in entering foreign markets. This strategic choice is particularly crucial for SMEs’ internationalisation strategies. This paper investigates the relationship between SMEs’ distribution strategies adopted abroad and their export performance, defined in terms of export intensity and diversification. The research hypotheses are proposed distinguishing between small- and medium-sized firms, as well as differentiating between regional and global markets. The empirical analysis refers to a sample of about 2600 Italian SMEs observed over the period 2004–2006, and considers different destination markets: the 25-country European Union area (regional market) and the rest of the world (global market). The empirical results suggest that commercial distribution based on agreements has a higher impact on SMEs’ export intensity than the other two distribution modes in the regional market, with the FDI-mode having a higher effect than the use of local traders. On the contrary, SMEs’ export intensity in the global market seems to benefit more from the use of local traders, while non-equity agreements present the lowest effect. Agreements-based distribution modes have the highest impact on SMEs’ export diversification, followed by FDIs and then by the distribution through local traders.

We analyse the financing of R&D activity in Italy, using data at firm level that cover a wide range of sources of financing, such as internal funds, bank loans and access to financial markets. Our analysis shows the importance of relationship lending in fostering innovative activities. The relation between innovative firms and their main bank tends to be relatively long lasting, permitting the bank to reduce information asymmetry, while low credit concentration is a common feature among these firms, presumably allowing them to attenuate hold-up problems. Nonetheless, firms that rely on bonds and outside equity financing tend to have a higher propensity to invest more in R&D, suggesting that relationship lending is only a partial substitute for access to stock and bond markets.

This paper investigates the role of the domestic value chain in transmitting the economic impact of Covid-19 lockdown measures. By employing techniques of complex networks analysis and input–output traditional tools, the study identifies those sectors that are key in the complex structure of the Italian supply chain and provides different rankings of the most ‘systemically important’ industries involved in the Covid-19 lockdown. The results suggest that by stopping the production process of many key sectors, the lockdown has led to a drop in input and output that, in turn, has generated a lock of about 52% of total circulating value added, 30% of which has been locked within indirect value chains. Further, by adding sectoral physical proximity indexes to the scenarios analysis, the method developed here provides a tool to guide governments in designing safe and efficient reopening policies.

In the present paper we empirically investigate the economic reasons why people spend time watching television both for informative and leisure purposes. We consider individual characteristics and country-level features. Particular attention is devoted to the impact of education and economic status on the allocation of time to TV and new media. We use data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 5—2010, 2012 and 2014 and from other minor empirical sources.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a major disruption in global value chains (GVCs) that pushed the global economy into a recession that promises to be worse than the 2008 crisis. This article illustrates the mechanisms through which the COVID-19 pandemic affected GVCs in the context of a changing configuration of the global economy. In particular, it is argued that GVCs became the main transmission channels of “economic contagion”. Finally, we posit that the pandemic provides an opportunity to revive the role of industrial policy as to govern the landslides of a world economy constantly pressured by globalization and deglobalization forces.

The paper presents a simple model of oligopoly, in which three firms produce differentiated goods. The degree of product substitutability is not uniform across goods. Merger profitability from the firms’ perspective is investigated. The model shows that the merger profitability depends on the degree of good differentiation. Contrary to what seems to emerge from different models, merger between firms that supply “more similar” product is more profitable as compared to merger between firms supplying more differentiated goods.