The area is coordinated by Gianmarco Ottaviano (Professor of Economics, Bocconi University). Resident researchers working in this area are Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Giulia Felice, Emanuele Forlani, Paolo Garella, and Anna Cecilia Rosso. Junior researcher is Tommaso Fonti.
Within this area, LdA fellows have been working extensively on the firm-level determinants of competitiveness and internationalisation pursuing several long-run lines of research.
More recent projects aim at investigating the role of dynamics of frontier and laggard firms in relation to the environment in which they operate. We 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. We are still working on the role of non-tariff trade barriers as one of the main obstacle 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. We have also contributed to a research report for the OECD on productivity and human capital which was presented at the OECD Annual Conference on firm productivity.
Details on latest research projects can be found below.
