PRIN – INTANGIBLE ASSETS AND ASYMMETRIES IN EUROPEAN VALUE CHAINS: THE POSITION OF ITALIAN FIRMS AND SECTORS

The project contributes to our understanding of how knowledge-based assets – such as patents and intangible assets – shape the distribution of value added, wages and employment along the global value chains in Europe (EUVCs). This research sets out to be the first endeavour to provide large-scale evidence of how such knowledge assets are concentrated along the EUVCs and the extent to which stark asymmetries still persist in Europe. To achieve this, the project will provide a new conceptual framework to understand such asymmetries in terms of functional specialisation, distinguishing among different intangible assets.

Building on these theoretical contributions, the research aims to make several empirical contributions.

1. The research will compile together data on inter-country input-output tables (ICIO) and recently published data on intangible assets from the EUKLEMS-INTAN Prod dataset, making this novel dataset publicly available.

2. The project offers new empirical analysis on the distribution of knowledge-based assets along EUVCs.

3. It complements this sector level analysis with additional analysis at the firm level to focus on multinational enterprises (MNEs), i.e. the key actors of globalisation that detain a large share of the knowledge-based assets and allocate knowledge and production activities across industries and sectors. It will do so by relying on ownership data from Orbis, which the project will augment with information on firms’ patenting activity and intangible investments.

The project will engage with a range of non-academic actors to disseminate the results through LEAP’s and LUISS’s extensive connections with both the private and public sector.