Abstract

Productivity, i.e., the efficiency with which nations, industries and firms use resources to achieve economically valuable results, is perhaps the most important measure available to policy-makers to gauge the health of an economic system. Early empirical explorations based on country- or industry-level data relied on representative firm paradigms. However, the increasing availability of firm-level data has provided robust evidence for the existence and persistence of wide productivity differentials among firms. In particular, questions regarding what supports such wide heterogeneity, which factors matter most, whether factors influencing productivity can be controlled by firms or are purely external products of the operating environment and which policies can be used to boost productivity growth are all of primary importance. This thesis contributes to the empirical literature on firm productivity with three core papers. The first re-examines the slowdown in productivity in Italian manufacturing by studying the link between innovation, imitation and human capital, which sustained wide heterogeneity of firm productivity behind the aggregate flat productivity trend. The second paper extends analysis to the services sector, in particular to tourism. At a very disaggregated level, it identifies the various sources of differences in productive efficiency of hotels stemming from entrepreneurial and managerial factors, and external to firm factors. The third paper examines the effect of public policy in tourism. A methodological advance is proposed by defining an econometric framework, which allows us to identify and estimate not only the direct but also the indirect effects which public policies may have on hotel performance, in a dynamic treatment setting.