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In this thesis we examined the export dynamics at the firm level. A two period model is proposed for the life of firms. The firms may have three different behaviors: staying out of markets, producing for the domestic market, and producing for both the domestic and the export markets. During two periods, firms may enter or exit the markets according to their expected) profits. All firms are profit maximizing such that they compare the maximum (expected) profits in the domestic and export markets. Firms are also heterogenous so that they have different levels of productivity. We examined changes in investment, market share and profits with respect to changes in the market and firm parameters. The profits and investments of the exporting and non-exporting firms are compared by both analytical and numerical methods.

Le résumé en français n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur. / Administrative registers maintained by statistical offices on vastly heterogeneous firms have much untapped potential to reveal details on sources of productivity of firms and economies alike. It has been proposed that firm-level shocks can go a long way in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Based on novel monthly frequency data, idiosyncratic shocks are able to explain a sizable share of the Finnish economic fluctuations, providing support to the granular hypothesis. The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 has challenged the field of economic forecasting, and nowcasting has become an active field. This thesis shows that the information content of firm-level sales and truck traffic can be used for nowcasting GDP figures, by using a specific mixture of machine learning algorithms. The agency problem lies at the heart of much of economic theory. Based on a unique dataset linking owners, CEOs and firms, and exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in the separation of ownership and control, agency costs seem to be an important determinant of firm productivity. Furthermore, the effect appear strongest in medium-sized firms. Enterprise group structures might have important implications on the voluminous literature on firm size, as large share of SME employment can be attributed to affiliates of large business groups. Within firm variation suggests that enterprise group affiliation has heterogeneous impacts depending on size, having strong positive impact on productivity of small firms, and negative impact on their growth. In terms of aggregate job creation, it is found that the independent small firms have contributed the most. The results in this thesis underline the benefits of paying attention to samples encompassing the total population of firms. Researchers should continue to explore the potential of rich administrative data sources at statistical offices and strive to strengthen the ties with data producers.

This Ph.D. project thesis is a collection of three autonomous works tied by a common focus, that is to inquire the role public sector – within the peculiar Italian context – may exert to improve firms’ performance, thus supporting the aggregate growth in country’s economy. The first two works relates to public procurement, the main tool within the demand-side policy measures, which is object of a revitalized interest in both policymakers and scholars. In the first work I investigate whether those Italian firms engaging in public procurement report a larger propensity to innovate with respect to their counterparts that exclusively target private customers, paying mainly at- tention on how any effect varies with the amount of public procurement a firm is engaged into. In the second work, which represents an extension of the previous one, the scope is enlarged in order to investigate whether municipal procurement, that is that promoted by Municipalities, affects firms (in terms of higher productivity) localized within the same municipal borders. This investigation grounds on a comprehensive dataset that merges the rich panel information about Italian firms – provided by RIL surveys – with more than a million of official administrative data on all the public tenders awarded in Italy between 2010-2018, provided by the Italian anti-corruption agency (ANAC). In the last work, the attention is shifted towards the way with whom firms manage their labor force to enhance their innovative performance. This work, which grounds its premises on the numerous reforms of labor market that followed one another in the last two decades, represents a first attempt with respect to the Italian context to look at three dimensions of numerical flexibility at the same time and to explore some potential channels capable to mediate the relation between numerical flexibility and innovation.