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This paper aims to introduce the contributions in this special issue on “Unemployment, innovation and R&D”, and provide a brief outline of the international conference organised by the Applied Econometrics Association on “Policies against Unemployment”.

The paper is descriptive in nature.

The papers presented in this special issue shed some light on the key determinants of unemployment levels, and help to identify policies that can tackle unemployment successfully.

Some radically different approaches to the issue of tackling unemployment are presented. The special issue, of which this paper is a part, provides further new evidence on the impact of innovation and R&D on employment/unemployment and unemployment persistence.

The aim of this paper is to assess the effects of traditional inputs and firms' R&D capital on labour productivity growth.

The study measures the effects of the traditional inputs on firms' productivity growth, through four procedures: OLS in first differences, within group, GMM in first differences and GMM system.

Whatever the specification considered, the more efficient estimates obtained from the GMM system show a similar effect of the firm's R&D stock upon its labour productivity performance.

The results suggest that physical capital plays a more prominent role for European firms than for US ones, while employees are more productive in the USA.

By presenting some empirical evidence on the effects of R&D on labour productivity, at the firm level, the present study makes two main contributions to the existing literature. First, a unique firm‐level database for European and US firms is used. It is self evident that firms in these countries operate in different economic and institutional settings; as a consequence the results identify some robust common effects concerning the two areas considered (the USA versus Europe) at the micro level. Second, service and manufacturing sectors are merged.

How many hours per week should workers in the USA and Germany spend at their paying jobs? The present paper aims to address this question by constructing policymakers' reaction functions capable of modelling the optimal length of working time as a function of the relevant labour market variables.

The study is based on a counterfactual policy experiment. Given a policymaker's loss function and a structural model of the labour market alternative specifications of reaction functions are defined where the response coefficients indicate how policymakers should react to any news in the labour market in order to stabilise employment and wages.

The results suggest that simple rules perform quite well and that the advantages obtained from adopting an optimal control‐based rule are not so great. Moreover, the analysis emphasises the success of the wage‐based rule and of the employment‐based rule in the USA and Germany, respectively.

The study is based on a counterfactual policy experiment, which perhaps limits its operational value.

Labour market authorities might stabilise employment and wages by implementing policy rules.

The paper proposes a policy rule to capture the dynamics of the weekly working hours. According to the rule in the paper the length of the workweek is an inverse function of the deviation between the actual and potential employment level.

The paper seeks to analyse the impact of different public policies on inequality, unemployment, growth and the tax burden.

A dynamic general equilibrium model is built, in which growth is driven by endogenous technical progress, to analyse the impacts of several policies (minimum wage, redistribution and R&D subsidies financed by an income tax).

All policies except pure redistribution are better than non‐intervention in terms of growth. The authors distinguish three major policy patterns. The Anglo‐Saxon model is characterised by high growth, high inequality, low unemployment and a low tax burden. The Nordic model combines high growth, low inequality and low unemployment, and a high tax burden. The Continental European model puts together medium inequality and a medium tax burden, and higher long‐term growth is paid for by high unemployment.

The model could be extended by the introduction of educational policy.

The paper distinguishes three configurations that capture the main features of the developments in Anglo‐Saxon countries, Scandinavian countries, and Continental European countries in the 1990s. It thereby provides a general framework to analyse and compare these experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causes of unemployment persistence among the Belgian labour force. The underlying issue is to determine the eventual existence of a true causal relationship between successive unemployment spells.

The model used is a dynamic random effects probit model controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and the initial condition problem. It was applied to the Panel Study on Belgian Households (1994‐2002).

The results suggest that while observed and unobserved heterogeneity explain between 57 per cent and 82 per cent of unemployment persistence, the remainder is induced by the presence of state dependence. All else being equal, an individual unemployed this year will be between 11.4 and 33 percentage points more likely to be unemployed next year as compared with an employed person.

The presence of a stigmatisation effect of unemployment means that the costs of unemployment are much higher than the simple loss of income and human capital associated with the current job loss. The study demonstrates the importance of concentrating efforts on the prevention of unemployment.

The paper's contribution is to test again the hypothesis of the presence of state dependence in unemployment using a different technique, allowing, among other things, to control for exogenous variables. The paper demonstrates its existence and measures its contribution in the explanation of unemployment persistence in Belgium, besides that of observed and unobserved characteristics.

This paper aims to shed light upon the controversial relationship between labour market flexibility and innovation in Italy, paying attention both to inter‐sectoral heterogeneity and to the regional differences.

A set of hypotheses concerning the context‐dependent relationship between labour market flexibility and innovation has been formulated by combining the main results of the theoretical literature concerning this topic. Regional patents are used as a proxy of innovation, while job turnover and wages represent labour market indicators of flexibility. Non‐parametric models and dynamic structural specification of panel data have been estimated to test the aforementioned hypotheses.

The results show that higher job turnover has a significant and negative impact on patent activities in regional sectors of northern Italy, while a positive and significant effect of blue and white collar wages has been generally found in the estimations.

There is a lack of updated information regarding labour market data in the Italian economy.

Knowing in which sectoral and regional context labour flexibility has (or does not have) a positive influence on innovation plays a key role for the decisions of policy makers.

This paper deals with the influence that the heterogeneity of the contexts (at the sectoral and geographical level) exerts on the relationship between the labour market and innovation. Moreover, the endogenous character of this relationship and the cumulative nature of innovative activities have been taken into account by means of a parsimonious dynamic econometric model.

Recent economic research has focused on the economic effects of the social environment. In the economic literature, important phenomena are considered, at least in part, as results of the individual's social environment. There is a similar revival of interest among economists who analyse the world of science and basic research. In this case as well, the environment plays a key role in the agent's behaviour. This paper aims at an empirical analysis of the influence of social interactions on scientists' productivity.

In the econometric analysis the authors investigate the aggregate importance of social interactions in science through the analysis of data on publications in four scientific fields of seven advanced countries. The paper builds a dynamic autoregressive model which provides long‐run multipliers. The model is estimated with a panel fixed effects methodology.

Social interactions among researchers have positive effects on a scientist's productivity, and there is a U‐shaped relation between the size of a scientific network and individual productivity. This result is interpreted as providing evidence for threshold externalities and increasing returns to scale.

Other better indicators of social interactions in science should be found and used in estimates. The set of countries and fields should be enlarged.

The paper represents the first econometric investigation of the issue at country level, and provides interesting results which are new for the economic literature.

This chapter provides a list and a brief description of files and documents where the name of Piero Sraffa is mentioned and are currently kept at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and at the Archivio Storico Diplomatico. For each file or document we provide indication of the reference number where it is conserved and a transcription of one or two of the relevant documents out of more than 500 which have been located. The purpose of the chapter is to illustrate the results of archival research of the last decade, including more recent findings, and furnish a groundwork for further research, which may throw further light on documents already known to us, and lead to the discovery of new documents or information, so as to provide a better basis for the reconstruction of the biography of Piero Sraffa and of people whose lives entwined with his – Antonio Gramsci certainly ranking high among them.

The purpose of this paper is to study how a small to medium‐size enterprise (SME) in Campania (Italy) integrated sustainability into its corporate strategy, and how its sustainable corporate strategies reflect on intangible assets.

The paper, an exploratory study based on grounded theory, analyzes are interviews with the entrepreneurial team and top and middle management. Findings are integrated with documentary analysis, internal process data and archival material.

Ethics and value systems play a significant role in devising sustainable corporate strategy. Competitive strategies, innovation, quality and responsibility are reflected in management procedures and the supply network system involving partners in sustainable innovation processes.

A single case study obviously limits the generalizing of the findings.

Entrepreneurs and managers can benefit from the study to build a relational network for sustainable development.

The process of sustainable value creation, sharing and the co‐creation of knowledge emerges fully in the case study analyzed. The study pivots on issues of innovation and eco‐sustainability as drivers for corporate sustainability and business ethics.

The purpose of this paper is to determine: how much the residual curvature could be formed in sintered nano‐silver assembly when it is cooled to room temperature from the sintering temperature (normally 275°C); how the cyclic temperature load affects the residual curvature or stresses in sintered joint. Then the stress level and the reliability of sintered nano‐silver for high‐temperature applications can be understood.

5 mm * 2.5 mm silicon chip was bonded with 96 per cent Al₂O₃ substrate by sintering nanosilver paste. An optical system was developed to measure the curvature of the sintered assemblies. Reliability of the sintered assemblies was evaluated by temperature cycling of −40∼125°C. Finite element analysis was employed to simulate the behavior of the joint subjected to the temperature cycling from −40°C to 125°C by ANSYS. SEM images were taken to investigate the impact of temperature cycling on the reliability of sintered silver attachment.

This residual bending at room temperature was found concave towards the substrate (alumina) side. Also, with the bondline thickness increasing, the residual curvature decreases obviously. The severity of the residual bending in all the structures was mitigated to some extent with increasing number of cycles. There is no crack in the joint with the thickness of 25 μm. The drop of the residual curvature of the samples with bondline of 25 μm is caused mainly by stress relaxation in sintered silver before 300 cycles. Sample with thicker bondline is more susceptible to thermal cycling for the structure bonded with nanosilver than that with thinner bondline. The poor quality of bonding is due to the thicker sintered joint, which means that sintered nanosilver is not suitable for die‐attachment requiring thick bondline.

The paper describes: how a precise optical system was developed to measure the residual curvature of the sintered assemblies; how the evolution of the residual curvature of the sintered assembly with the temperature cycling was obtained by both experiment and simulation; and how microstructures of the sintered silver joint were analyzed for as‐sintered assembly and the sintered assembly after temperature cycling.