Experience, Innovation and Productivity - Empirical Evidence from Italy's Slowdown



will use 2SLS-IV method for the equation systems (9) and (9’) at the second stage as well, where
the growth rate of the capital-labor ratio is instrumented.

4. The dataset

We collected balance sheet data for a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms and their
board characteristics in the period 2001-2003 from two sources of data. Information about
employment characteristics, innovation activity and R&D investment at the firm level come from
the IXth Survey on Manufacturing Firms by the Italian bank Capitalia-Unicredit.

This survey has been run in 2004 through questionnaires distributed to 4177 firms. The
questionnaires inquire about location, legal form, group, sales, investments, R&D investments,
innovation activity, exports, labor force characteristics, financial status and incentives, balance
sheets. Most of the quantitative information relates to the previous three years since the time of the
survey, separately. Some qualitative answers, instead, are related to the whole three-year period, i.e.
innovation activity.

Information about balance sheets and age of the board members come instead from the AIDA
database.8 AIDA is updated every week but maintains balance sheet data for the previous years as
well. Thus we extracted balance sheet items over the 2001-2003 spanning to check and correct for
inconsistencies between the two sources. Incidentally, our chosen sub-period - the years between
2001 and 2003 - happens to be a period during which Italy’s productivity shortfall has been
particularly severe.

While we can extract balance sheet from AIDA in the years of interest to match the two sources, the
database registers just the latest board composition, which means that we access information about
board members of existing firms on December 31, 2007. We know the year at which the person was
8 AIDA is managed by Bureau Van Dijk. It collects balance sheets, proprietary shares, firm characteristics and board
characteristics on about 250000 Italian firms. We accessed the data on firms with at least €800.000 gross sales as of 31
December 2007.

14



More intriguing information

1. Two-Part Tax Controls for Forest Density and Rotation Time
2. The Folklore of Sorting Algorithms
3. The name is absent
4. The Context of Sense and Sensibility
5. AN IMPROVED 2D OPTICAL FLOW SENSOR FOR MOTION SEGMENTATION
6. PRIORITIES IN THE CHANGING WORLD OF AGRICULTURE
7. Permanent and Transitory Policy Shocks in an Empirical Macro Model with Asymmetric Information
8. Conditions for learning: partnerships for engaging secondary pupils with contemporary art.
9. An Estimated DSGE Model of the Indian Economy.
10. A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School
11. Are combination forecasts of S&P 500 volatility statistically superior?
12. The Impact of Minimum Wages on Wage Inequality and Employment in the Formal and Informal Sector in Costa Rica
13. GOVERNANÇA E MECANISMOS DE CONTROLE SOCIAL EM REDES ORGANIZACIONAIS
14. Neural Network Modelling of Constrained Spatial Interaction Flows
15. The Role of State Trading Enterprises and Their Impact on Agricultural Development and Economic Growth in Developing Countries
16. Rural-Urban Economic Disparities among China’s Elderly
17. The name is absent
18. Word Sense Disambiguation by Web Mining for Word Co-occurrence Probabilities
19. Labour Market Institutions and the Personal Distribution of Income in the OECD
20. DURABLE CONSUMPTION AS A STATUS GOOD: A STUDY OF NEOCLASSICAL CASES