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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.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of performance-related pay (PRP) on productivity and wages of Italian firms.

A unique data set for the Italian economy, obtained from the ISFOL Employer and Employee Surveys (2005, 2007, 2010), is used to estimate the relationship between PRP, labour productivity and wages, also controlling for an ample set of covariates. The authors performed standard quantile regressions (QRs) to investigate heterogeneity in associations of PRP with labour productivity and wages. In a second stage, the endogeneity of PRP was taken into account by using instrumental variable QR techniques.

The econometric estimates suggests that PRP are incentive schemes that substantially lead to efficiency enhancements and wage gains. These findings are confirmed for firms under union governance and suggest that well-designed policies, that circumvent the limited implementation of PRP practices, would guarantee productivity improvement and wage premiums for employees.

The main limitation of the findings concerns PRP data, that do not offer statistical information on different types of schemes, at group or individual level.

This paper is the first to investigate, on a national scale for the Italian economy, the role of PRP on both productivity and wages, in order to shed light on the efficiency and distributive implications, whereas most of the studies of related literature are restricted to one of those aspects.

Technological regimes define the environment in which innovative and learning activities take place in each sector of the economy. In this paper, the authors argue that technological regimes must be interpreted and elaborated by each organisation operating within a sector in order to be implemented rationally, which leads us to the concept of perceived technological regimes.

The authors tested the relevance of firms' perceptions of different technological regimes on a sample of wine companies in Italy. The authors run a questionnaire survey and obtained 334 clean responses. Data drawn from questionnaires were analysed via econometric analysis.

The authors present empirical evidence that this perception tends to vary across different wine technologies. Additionally, the authors find evidence that firms' technology adoption, absorptive capacity and external knowledge sourcing have a strong impact on their perceptions of the relevance of a given wine-making technology.

While individual technological regimes are characterised by systematic differences in the distribution of heterogeneous firm types, previous empirical studies have not explored whether the technological environment defining a given industry is differently interpreted and elaborated by each firm operating in it.