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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.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the factors driving labour creation in Russia, while paying attention to the role of innovation policy. The study considers innovation variables with indicators linked to social conditions (social filter component) and geographical spillovers for 85 regions during the period 2010-2016.

In particular, the study uses latitude and longitude coordinates to compute the distance between Russian regions according to the Haversine formula. In this manner, it measures the spillovers as the weighted sum of R&D capital stock on the basis of computed distance, according to the accessibility index procedure.

The finding is very important in terms of policy implications for supporting employment. As the results stress that own innovation produces labour creation effects, while knowledge spillovers are labour-saving, the study could conclude that regional innovation policy may have undetermined the objective of an efficient level of absorptive capacity able to benefit positively from external innovation.

The study contributes to the literature by exploring whether geographical spillovers are labour-friendly or labour-saving in Russia.

What is the effect of an increase of migration inflows on the R&D and innovative performance of developing countries? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of migration inflows on the R&D and innovation activity (measured as expenditures on R&D and technological innovations) in Russian regions.

To this end, the authors use data on 85 Russian regions for the period 2010-2016 through a multi-region economic geography model. In particular, the authors test the hypothesis about the importance of migration inflows on R&D and technological innovation activity (H1) and the hypothesis about the importance of immigrants’ (incoming migrants) human capital (measured by the education level of incoming migrants) on R&D and innovation activity (H2).

Empirical findings support the evidence in favour of a positive causal link between innovation and migration inflows. Results of our investigation are important because they suggest useful insights for formulating science and innovation policies in Russia, which is a developing country where the recent policies favouring the technological innovation as the transition period have not yet achieved a satisfying outcome.

This paper increases the knowledge in the field with respect to the existing literature, shedding further light on the migration inflows effects, which is a political topic to manage very relevant in all countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent spending on innovation activities and collaboration at the industry level affects the relationship between firm innovation and performance.

A conceptual model was proposed and empirically tested using multiple linear regression. The data were obtained from the Community Innovation Survey 2012, composing a sample of 890 Italian manufacturing firms.

The results provided full support for the positive moderating effect of intra-industry innovation spending and partial support for the positive moderating effect of intra-industry collaboration, both regarding the relationship between firm innovation spending and performance. Knowledge spillovers derived from intra-industry innovation spending and intra-industry collaboration affect firm performance. While this finding corroborates other studies that have found that the intra-industry R&D spending influences firms’ innovation and performance, it also contributes to improve the understanding about the complementarity of internal innovation activities and knowledge spillovers.

This study contributes to theory by filling a gap concerning the complementarity of internal innovation activities and the effect of knowledge spillovers to improve firm performance. Our findings suggested that intra-industry openness to collaboration and innovation spending, as proxies of knowledge spillovers, plays an important role in complementing firm level innovative efforts, even in the case of firms that spend less on innovation and have a lower degree of collaboration. This is especially relevant for small and medium enterprises, which can take advantage of access to the necessary information to overcome their internal resource constraints for R&D and innovation. The originality of these findings adds value in terms of furthering the understanding of this phenomenon.

The implications of trade on developing economies have generated substantial debates with most studies focussed on “openness in the policy”. Hence, the purpose of this study is to focus on “openness in practice”.

This study uses two models and employed the vector error correction model and structural vector autoregression, first, to examine the sectoral effects; second, to investigate the efficacy of neoclassical and new trade theories; and third, to analyse the effect of trade openness shock on Nigerian labour market performance.

The results of the first model showed that trade openness has an adverse effect on employment and wages in both the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Likewise, the study concludes that the new trade theory explains trade's behaviour on employment and wages in Nigeria. The second model showed that the effect of error shock from trade openness affected wages more than employment.

The study ignores the distributional effects due to unavailability of data.

The study suggested, amongst others, the need for policies mix on the labour market via a coherent set of initiatives in other to increase the competitiveness of Nigeria in the international market.

Most studies focussed on openness in policy through the channels identified in the literature. However, this study investigates these channels in “openness in practice” and investigates trade theories' efficacy on manufacturing and agricultural sectors in Nigeria, which has been neglected in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the correlation between the educational level and the number of children in Italy, where a very low fertility rate may be observed.

Since the number of children ever born is a count variable, Poisson regression is the suitable statistical procedure used to conduct the empirical analysis. First, the authors estimate the correlation between the female's education and her number of children, and then the authors use also partner's education to take into account the family dimension. Furthermore, in the context of fertility, zero observations might be due either to the choice not to have children, or to the impossibility of becoming a mother. For this reason, the authors adopt also a more appropriate tool, that is a zero‐inflated Poisson regression.

From the empirical results, a significant negative correlation may be observed between the level of education and the number of children.

There are other studies in the literature focusing on the correlation between female participation rate and her fertility rate in the Italian case. In those frameworks, the education variable is usually considered as a control variable. The paper's contribution to the literature is twofold: on one hand the authors develop a theoretical model giving an intuition reason of mechanism underlying the fertility behaviour of families; on the other hand, the authors implement more appropriate empirical models to test for this hypothesis, taking education as the main variable.

The paper aims at addressing the following research questions: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency? And which pillars of institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

By specifying a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method where GHG emissions are considered as the bad output and the GDP is referred as the desirable one, the work computes the environmental efficiency into the appraisal of a production function for the European countries over three decades.

According to the countries' performance, the findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries. In this environmental context, the role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries.

This article attempts to analyze the role of different dimensions of institutional quality in different European countries' performance – in terms of mitigating GHGs (undesirable output) – while trying to raise their economic performance through their GDP (desirable output).

1. The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

2. We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

3. The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

4. The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies face significant challenges in formulating effective strategies to enter international markets, particularly amid uncertain conditions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, there is a pressing need to examine the performance of these SMEs and evaluate their internationalization process. This study aims to examine the effects of international entrepreneurial orientation on the internationalization performance of SMEs and the mediating effects of organizational dynamic capability and organizational culture in Indonesia.

This study used a quantitative method with a survey approach by distributing questionnaires to 206 SMEs in Indonesia that have implemented internationalization practices. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to predict and estimate relationships.

This study finds that one of the SMEs’ strategies to encounter the new normal era of COVID-19 is to improve their internationalization performance, especially by actively participating in international markets. The empirical results show that organizational dynamic capabilities and organizational culture are proven to fully mediate the relationship between international entrepreneurial orientation and the internationalization performance of SMEs. Meanwhile, international entrepreneurial orientation does not directly affect SMEs’ internationalization performance. This study confirms the mediating role of organizational dynamic capabilities and organizational culture in dynamic capabilities theory and their relevance to internationalization.

This study provides valuable insights and encourages owner-managers and policy-makers in emerging economies, particularly Indonesia, to develop organizational dynamic capabilities and organizational culture that align with the demands of internationalization.

This paper investigates the relationship between agricultural entrepreneurship (AE) and new technologies using academic and practitioners' perspectives to understand how new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and augmented reality can promote agri-businesses.

The paper adopts a content and thematic analysis of 325 academic sources extracted from the Scopus database and 683 patents retrieved from the European Patent Office (EPO) dataset. Additionally, the research applies the Kruskal–Wallis test as a non-parametric test for evaluating differences in the main concepts discussed in the two sources.

The academic and practitioners' debate highlights a trading zone among the two streams. patents' analysis from the EPO reveals four main common themes as a new business that benefits from AI in weather predictions, new smart and intelligent ways to monitor crops, new businesses that use clouds to control plant's humidity. The analysis of Scopus's sources demonstrates theoretical approaches related to the technology acceptance model (TAM) and practical strategies in terms of entrepreneurial skills to support the agricultural sector. However, barriers among the two streams of sources exist in innovation management and scale-up entrepreneurial initiatives.

Regarding implications, the authors aim to connect academic and practitioners' views by understanding the new potential innovation applications and the connected new research avenues. Limitations might arise from the sources used to develop our analysis.

The paper is novel because it investigates the issues arising from the relationship between AE and new technologies by examining original validated patents released by practitioners and approved by the EPO, rather than reviewing blogs or the financial press. This leads to a holistic understanding of the impact of tangible practices among agricultural entrepreneurs. The results support the view that new trading zones and case studies are needed to highlight and show the positive impact of technologies in this field. The authors argue that practitioners require scholars to reduce the ambiguity between AE and its expected results, leading to investments to boost new agricultural business ideas.

In the context of collaborative research and development (R&D), multi-actor participation and multi-resource integration of technological knowledge has become the mainstream paradigm for the R&D and spillover of industry generic technology (GT). As GT's core characteristics, “fundamentality” and “externality,” make differential requests on knowledge bases regarding the R&D and spillover of GT (SGT). Knowledge breadth can enhance the generality of technology. The purpose of this paper is to integrate “generic technology R&D” and “generic technology spillover” into a single study, and try to solve the theoretical problem of “whether broader mean more general?”

This paper collects and collates the patent data from the two patent databases of Derwent and SooPAT, and then makes an empirical analysis of the patent data collected by the authors with the data analysis software Stata.

Taking 352 strategic emerging firms in China as the sample, this paper examined the effects of general knowledge breadth (GKB) and specific knowledge breadth (SKB) on the R&D and SGT. The authors concluded that both general and SKB have a positive effect on the R&D of GT (RGT), and the latter has a greater effect. There is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between SKB and SGT.

The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows. GT can effectively link different technologies and knowledge fields (Gambardella and Giarratana, 2013; Appio et al., 2017a, b). Therefore, existing studies regard the role of knowledge breadth on the R&D and SGT as an existing hypothesis. This paper challenges such hypothesis in two ways. First, this paper divides knowledge breadth into “general knowledge breadth” and “specific knowledge breadth” in response to the insufficient division of knowledge breadth in previous research, although some existing studies have examined the antecedents of the R&D and SGT from the perspective of R&D and SGT. Thus, the authors define GKB as the scope of context-free knowledge and SKB as the scope of context-specific knowledge, both of which shows differential nature, source and application. Second, this paper decomposes the effect of knowledge breadth on RGT, as well as on SGT, basing on distinguishing the SKB from GKB. Existing research reaches a consensus of the positive role of knowledge breadth, no matter on RGT or SGT (e.g. Schmidt et al., 2016; Appio et al., 2017a, b). Yet, such hypothesis ignores the refinement and decomposition of “knowledge breadth” in the research field of R&D and SGT, which is essential in promoting the development of GT theory. In this paper, the authors find that these two types of knowledge breadths play different roles in the RGT, and especially SKB plays a double-edged sword effect on the SGT.