Exchange operational costs and long-term relationship between firms

Long-term contracts; Transaction costs; Inter-firm relationships; Asset specifity

Assessing the determinants of fast growth in Italy

Few firms grow in a rapid way, but their contribution to employment growth is often impressive. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze both external and internal factors which can affect the probability of being a high-growth firm (HGF) in Italy. We found that HGFs are on average young firms and are present in different sectors, but the role of demand is important to understand their performance at sectoral level. Moreover, our findings show that financial constraints and profitability are not associated with the probability of being a fast-growing firm. HGFs, on average, are characterised by high productivity, but only when growth is measured in terms of sales. The most original results of this study concerns endogenous determinants of fast growth, which have not so far been adequately examined in the literature. First, we found that the concentration of ownership is important for HGFs that grow in sales. Second, the quality of human capital is a strong point for firms experiencing rapid employment growth.: high-growth firms, firm growth, human capital, rapid firm growth

Firm size and growth opportunities: a survey

The qualifying aspect of the ongoing changes in firm growth processes seems to be the increased heterogeneity of size and a trend towards a broader fluctuation in average size. Exogenous factors (market size, demand trends, technological innovations, higher competition) determine a different impact on firms will to increase their own size, while endogenous variables play a greater role than in the past. The outcome is represented by a growth pattern that characterises some firms, but not all of them. Growth appear to be an asymmetric phenomenon, involving selectively but not casually a subgroup of firms. In the present paper it is hypothesized that growth stems from the asymmetric distribution of internalized resources (both material and immaterial), allowing some firms (regardless of the original size) to enter evolutionary paths that others don’t want or simply can’t enter.Firm Growth, Size Distribution, Gibrat’s Law, Industrial Dynamics, Human Capital, Intangible Assets, Industrial Policy

Social capital, local institutions, and cooperation between firms

There are many different reasons behind cooperation between firms and many possible interpretations are assumed to be based on an assessment of endogenous benefits of collective action directly generated by taking part in a joint project. This paper attempts at verifying the interpretative capacity of models analysing the cooperation between firms using not only technological or organisational factors and rivalry between firms, but also some proxy variables of social capital, of experience accumulation in collective action and of institutional capacity for initiative. The specific aim of our work is hence that of providing an interpretation of Italian inter-province differentials in the propensity of inter-firm cooperation.35

Social Capital, Institutions and Collective Action Between Firms

This work is based on the hypothesis that explanation of collective action between firms requires partly different variables from that used in explaining collective action between individuals. In order to look at the problem of what determines collective action, a model has been built using alongside social capital, the historical tradition of collective action and the activism of institutional actors as explicative variables of associationism between firms. The empirical results confirm the theoretical hypotheses put forward in the first part of the paper. First, social capital, institutional activism and experience accumulation, all together, enhance the propensity to collective action between firms. Each variable plays a significant role in explaining inter-firm co-operation. Secondly, these variables, however, affect the behaviour of small firms while the large ones appear to follow a different pattern of conduct. Thirdly, the empirical findings seem also to suggest that social capital and institutional proactive initiative produce synergic effects on collective action. The two variables reinforce each other in their effects on co-operation. Finally, the positive correlation between social capital and institutional initiative emerging from the empirical results suggests that an increase in the endowment of social capital tends to rise the level of institutional activity and the other way round.social capital, economic institutions, firms co-operation

Capitale sociale, contesto istituzionale e performance innovativa delle imprese

Questo lavoro intende verificare se la presenza di fattori socio-istituzionali (capitale sociale, l’attivismo istituzionale e l’accumulazione di esperienze di azione collettiva fra imprese) in un territorio, valorizzando il ruolo delle esternalità “da conoscenza”, possa favorire la performance innovativa della singola impresa. Si utilizzano i dati dell’Indagine Capitalia sulle imprese manifatturiere italiane e la banca dati ISL dell’Università di Parma per elaborare un modello econometrico in cui il processo innovativo è condizionato da fattori interni ed esterni all'impresa. I risultati suggeriscono che la capacità innovativa delle imprese è favorita dalla presenza di capitale sociale (inteso come senso civico e come interazione sociale) e dall’attivismo delle istituzioni intermedie.Social Capital, Intermediate Institutions, Collective Action, Product and Process innovation, Technological Spillovers, Knowledge Spillovers

Institutions and co-ordination costs

Economic literature sees the existence of institutions as being justified by market failure. This paper attempts to develop a different hypothesis by linking institutions to the solution of co-ordination dilemmas. According to this line of thought, institutional action is not circumscribed to the supplying of ‘regulative resources’ able to lower uncertainty and limiting the risks of free riding. It includes rather the provision of a vast set of public goods characterised by high complementarity and marked constraints on the continuity of supply. In the production of such goods, the presence of multiplicity of equilibria and high costs of information born by individual agents in formulating a cooperative agreement often makes a decentralised decision-making process impracticable. On the other hand, as we try to show, a central authority (an institutional subject), assuming long term obligations and lowering co-ordination costs, can mitigate collective action problems in a wide range of circumstances

Opportunismo e coordinamento: soluzioni regolative e istituzionali

The present paper builds on Arrighetti e Curatolo, 2009, 2010 by introducing heterogeneous opportunists into an agent-based simulated world populated by heterogeneous loyal agents playing a repeated coordination game. On average, opportunistic exploitation of economic resources lowers coordination, especially in less endowed contexts. Simulation strategy proposed in the paper compares, keeping constant the aggregate cost of policy, three different kinds of public schemes aimed at reducing the economic cost of opportunism: regulatory schemes, incentive (or premiality) schemes and a third scheme based on institutional catalyst agents. Regulatory schemes based on sanctions produce the emergence of adverse redistribution effects: removal of opportunism is an efficient strategy only for less endowed local contexts, while the policy taxation burden hits too much the local environments where collective action is stronger. In line with many authors (see Hall, 2005; Camerer e Hogarth, 1999; Verdier, 2004), incentive (premiality) schemes perform badly especially because their net effects are limited to the first stages of the games. The schemes based on institutional catalyst agents seems to be the best performers: in facts, these schemes are efficient, especially through a process of learning, in pulling the other agents toward an high degree of coordination, so counter-balancing the effects of opportunists’ exploitation. Moreover an high degree of synergy emerges from a combined regulatory-institutional catalyst scheme, while incentive scheme (premiality) show, at the opposite, negative synergy both with institutional catalyst agents’ and regulatory schemes.Opportunism, Coordination Games, Regulation, Incentives, Institutions