Within this area, LdA fellows have been working extensively on the firm-level determinants of competitiveness and internationalisation, in particular on the role of non-tariff trade barriers as one of the main obstacles to firms’ internationalization. Barriers such as quotas, packaging conditions or not-uniformed sanitary conditions may limit trade activity of firms and affect a wide range of firm-level outcomes (such as firms’ population, productivity and exports). We compare non-tariff trade barriers with tariff in order to evaluate the effect of different types of protection on the domestic producers, and we also look into the impact of firms’ organization on firms’ performance and asks how internal capital and labour markets operating within business groups affect firms’ resilience to positive and negative shocks. The LdA team has also been investigating the role of dynamics of frontier and laggard firms in relation to the environment in which they operate with a focus on finance and quality of governance, looking at whether leaders and laggards make a different use of these inputs and whether this difference is strengthened for peripheral laggards.
The area is coordinated by Gianmarco Ottaviano (Professor of Economics, Bocconi University). Resident researchers working in this area are Giorgio Barba Navaretti (University of Milan), Giulia Felice (Politecnico di Milano), Emanuele Forlani (University of Pavia), Paolo Garella (University of Milan), and Anna Rosso (University of Insubria). Junior researchers are Borisav Markovic, Federico Pessina, and Tommaso Fonti.
Details on latest research projects can be found below.
