Maria Enrica Virgillito

• Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

This paper posits that what has been currently understood as a new return of industrial policies is actually a vague and rhetorical usage of the notion, as the current framework lacks the proper understanding of industrial policies as instruments to firstly, orient the rate and direction of technical change; secondly, govern and shape the direction...

This article proposes a novel framework to investigate how globalisation affects workers’ share of value added. We explore functional income distribution by looking at industrial interdependence and thus identifying Global Value Chains (GVCs) as the unit of analysis; we then track inputs’ composition and their labour share evolution along the value...

This paper looks at the co-evolution of toxic industrial pollution and economic deprivation by means of spillovers from the plant’s production activities. Geolocalised facility-level data from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) are used to calculate annual chemical-specific pollution, weighted by its toxicity. We combine...

This article discusses the case of the minimimum wage for Italy as a policy instrument to foster both social justice and productive efficiency. After briefly reviewing the empirical evidence on the effects of minimum wages upon employment, wage distribution and firm-level reallocation, it presents a series of channels, from the micro to the macro l...

The purpose of this work is to study the joint interaction of three founding elements of modern capitalism, namely endogenous technical change, income distribution, and labor markets, within a low-dimensional nonlinear dynamic setup extending the Goodwin model. Going beyond the conservative structure typical of the predator–prey model, we insert an...

What is rentified capitalism? And, how can we characterise its unfolding into the socio-economic sphere? This paper theoretically and empirically defines attributes and trends of rentified capitalism, that we shall argue, it is more than a stage of capitalism, but it rather represents a new socio-economic paradigm characterised by the primacy of re...

Focusing on labour requirements incorporated into GVCs, in the following, we develop a novel, non conventional measure of learning capabilities, represented by knowledge embodied along the division of labour within global production networks. In order to capture the division of labour, and the ensuing division of embodied knowledge, we move from mo...

Drawing upon the labour-augmented K+S Agent-Based Model (ABM), this paper develops a two-country North-South ABM wherein the leader and the laggard country interact through the international trade of machines. The model aims to address sources of asymmetries and possible converge patterns between two economies belonging to a currency union, that ar...

Are wages really a good proxy of the value of labour? Or, alternatively, do they largely reflect socio-institutional embedded practices of current societies according to which a manager deserves to be paid more than a nurse? This paper studies the determinants of wage remuneration and wage distribution focusing on two neglected origins of inequalit...

This paper is a critical review of the empirical literature resulting from recent years of debate and analysis regarding technology and employment and the future of work as threatened by technology, outlining both lessons learned and challenges ahead. We distinguish three waves of studies and relate their heterogeneous findings to the choice of tec...

This article represents one of the first attempts at building a direct measure of occupational exposure to robotic labour‐saving technologies. After identifying robotic and labour‐saving robotic patents, the underlying 4‐digit CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) code definitions, together with O*NET (Occupational Information Network) task descr...

How does Italy position inside the European structure of trade relationships? How labour bilateral flows have changed over time? Which type of employment activity has been outsourced? Which insourced? Focusing on a three-country perspective, what are the employment bilateral relationships between Italy-Germany-Poland (descending periphery-core-asce...

This paper is one of the first attempts at empirically identifying organizational capabilities—in this work concerning Italian firms. Together, it proposes new evidence on the link between capabilities and economic performances. To this aim, we employ the Indagine Multiscopo del Censimento Permanente delle Imprese (IMCPI), a survey carried out by t...

The Covid-19 crisis has been defined as a She-recession because of its disproportionate impact on female employment by contrast to past recessions defined as Man-recessions, for the usual disproportionate impact on men. The roots of the She-recession can be however traced back to the persistence of gender asymmetries both intra-household and extra-...

This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) of endogenous arrival of technological paradigms and new sectors entailing different patterns of labour creation and destruction, as well as of consumption dynamics. The model, building on the labour-augmented K+S ABM, addresses the long-term patterns of labour demand emerging from heterogeneous forms...

Wages and productivity represent two of the most relevant v ariables to consider in economic development. Given the low productivity lev els that emerging countries rev eal, the accumulation of productive capabilities and a narrower dispersion across sectors would enable emerging countries to overcome the middle-income trap. Y et, this positiv e tr...

A full understanding of the technological complexity underlying robotics and automation is still lacking, most of all when focusing on the impacts on work in services. By means of a qualitative analysis based on over 50 interviews to HR managers, IT technicians, workers and trade union delegates, this work provides evidence on the main changes occu...

This paper analyses medium-term labour market trends from 1983 to 2018 in Italy relying on the “Rilevazione dei contratti di lavoro” from INPS archive which provides information on average salaries by professional category, age, gender, and geographical origin. Within an overall pattern of exacerbated wage inequalities, documented by means of diffe...

Building on the labour-augmented K+S model framework, we analyse the Italian North-South divide by means of an agent-based model (ABM) endogenously reproducing the divergence between two artificial macro-regions. The latter are characterized by identical initial conditions in terms of productive and innovation structures, but different labour marke...

In this article we focus on the role of exports in Chinese economic development in the era of WTO accession. We address a series of different, although connected, questions. First, do Chinese exporting and non-exporting firms differ in terms of their productivity performance and paid wages? Second, to what extent exporting and non-exporting firms h...

This paper, using a long-term, product-level, cross-country dataset, analyzes the trade–growth nexus by introducing two novel indicators able to capture demand and supply attributes of countries’ quality of specialization. The Keynesian efficiency index measures demand attractiveness of the export baskets, estimating product-level demand elasticiti...

Why are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organizations? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socio-economic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk str...

This paper, using a long-term, product-level cross-country dataset, analyzes the trade-growth nexus by introducing two novel indicators able to capture demand and supply attributes of countries' quality of specialization. The Keynesian efficiency index measures demand attractiveness of the export baskets, estimating product-level demand elasticitie...

This paper investigates the presence of explicit labour-saving heuristics within robotic patents. It analyses innovative actors engaged in robotic technology and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies the technological fields more exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language processi...

Lockdown and vaccination policies have been the major concern in the last year in order to contain the SARS-CoV-2 infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a model able to evaluate alternative lockdown policies and vaccination strategies. Our approach integrates and refines the multiscale model proposed by Bellomo et al., 20...

This paper contributes to an old and still unresolved question in the theory of organizations, namely, what do bosses do? Whether and to what extent managerial functions are productive or not for the well functioning of an organization has to be understood with respect to the tension between knowledge and power. Here, we start addressing such a ten...

The modeling of living systems composed of many interacting entities is treated in this paper with the aim of describing their collective behaviors. The mathematical approach is developed within the general framework of the kinetic theory of active particles. The presentation is in three parts. First, we derive the mathematical tools, subsequently,...

What has been the dynamics of productivity in the Italian business firms in the aftermath of the crisis? And what has been the impact of training efforts upon such dynamics? In this work, we address these questions exploring a unique Italian micro-level dataset which links information on the amount and the nature of training and firm balance-sheet...

This paper addresses, both theoretically and empirically, the sectoral patterns of job creation and job destruction in order to distinguish the alternative effects of embodied vs disembodied technological change operating into a two-sector economy. Disembodied technological change turns out to positively affect employment dynamics in the “upstream”...

This paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labor-saving innovations back to early nineteenth century. The identification of mechanization/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et...

Contrary to the notion of a natural tendency in deindustrialization, this paper, performing a cross-country long-term analysis, documents the existence of a variety of patterns of deindustrialization. Looking at industrial sectors and their technological characteristics, categorised on the ground of the Pavitt (1984) taxonomy, we do find a markedly...

This article presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macroeconomic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced economies at the turn of the 21st century. It shows that a si...

This paper is a first step to chase the ambitious objective of developing a mathmatical theory of living systems. The contents refer modeling large systems of interacting living entities with the aim of describing their collective behaviors by differential models. The contents is in three parts. Firstly, we derive the mathematical method; subsequen...

Which type of work do Italians perform? In this contribution, we aim at detecting the anatomy of the Italian occupational structure by taking stock of a micro-level dataset registering the task content, the execution of procedures, the knowledge embedded in the work itself, called ICP (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni), the latter being compa...

Why are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organiza-tions? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socioeconomic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk str...

This article explores the relationship between the introduction of Industry 4.0 automation systems, the organisation of the work process, and the implications for employment, skill composition, power relations, and workers’ intervention authority. We investigate the undergoing technological and organisational transformation in three high-tech autom...

This paper is devoted to the multidisciplinary modelling of a pandemic initiated by an aggressive virus, specifically the so-called SARS–CoV–2 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, corona virus n.2. The study is developed within a multiscale framework accounting for the interaction of different spatial scales, from the small scale of the virus itself...

The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the “last straw that breaks the camel’s back”. At the time of writing, after three months since its outburst, we can hardly find any sign of a “broken camel”: indeed, it could have been the opportunity to collectively question the current regime of production and appropriation, exc...

This paper constitutes the first attempt to bridge the evolutionary theory in economics and the theory of active particles in mathematics. It seeks to present a kinetic model for an evolutionary formalization of economic dynamics. The new derived mathematical representation intends to formalize the processes of learning and selection as the two fun...

This paper is devoted to the multidisciplinary modelling of a pandemic initiated by an aggressive virus, specifically the so-called \textit{SARS--CoV--2 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, corona virus n.2}. The study is developed within a multiscale framework accounting for the interaction of different spatial scales, from the small scale of the vi...

Although the common perception is that the pandemic is ‘the great equaliser’, workers’ tasks, contractual framework and position in the internal organisational hierarchy strongly affect their ability to work remotely.

The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the "last straw that breaks the camel's back". At the time of writing, after three months since its outburst , we can hardly find any sign of a "broken camel": indeed, it could have been the opportunity to collectively question the current regime of production and appropriation , e...

In this work we discuss the research findings from the labour-augmented Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K + S) agent-based model. It comprises comparative dynamics experiments on an artificial economy populated by heterogeneous, interacting agents, as workers, firms, banks and the government. The exercises are characterized by different degrees of labou...

This paper highlights new findings on the wage-productivity nexus in the World Factory Economy. After presenting the long-run macro-elasticity characterizing the phase of Chinese economic development since the eighties, we look at the wage-productivity nexus from a micro level perspective using a detailed firm-level dataset covering the period of o...

Resumen En este artículo se investiga si las sociedades asisten a una nueva revolución industrial, y cuál es la repercusión del cambio tecnológico en el tejido socioeconómico, principalmente con respecto al empleo, la distribución de la renta, las condiciones de trabajo y las relaciones laborales. Los autores sostienen que los procesos de innovació...

Résumé Nos sociétés vivent‐elles aujourd'hui une nouvelle révolution industrielle? Les auteurs s'efforcent de répondre à cette question à partir d'une évaluation des conséquences des changements technologiques sur le tissu socio‐économique actuel, notamment sous l'angle de l'emploi, des inégalités, des conditions de travail et des relations profess...

Which type of work do Italians perform? In this contribution we aim at detecting the anatomy of the Italian occupational structure by taking stock of a micro-level dataset registering the task content, the execution of procedures, the knowledge embedded in the work itself, called ICP (Indagine Cam-pionaria sulle Professioni), the latter being compa...

Call for papers interna al IV Convegno SISEC 2020 (Torino, 30 gennaio - 1 Febbraio 2020) Deadline abstract submission: 31 Ottobre 2019. Abstract richiesto: 2.000/5.000 battute Titolo Sessione 31: Tecnologie, lavoro e organizzazione ai tempi dell'industria 4.0: fra controllo dei lavoratori e dinamiche di rinegoziazione L’affermarsi dell’ondata t...

The reflections which follow build on two interrelated questions, namely, first, whether we are witnessing another “industrial revolution”, and second, what is the impact of technological transformations upon the current dynamics of the socio‐economic fabric, especially with respect to employment, income distribution, working conditions and labour...

We explore the extent to which the current technological trend, dubbed Industry 4.0, might increase forms of control inside organisations, by focussing on pivotal firms in the so-called Italian Motor Valley currently embracing its adoption. We find that Industry 4.0 technologies open up great possibilities for incorporating the three forms of contr...

In this work we develop a set of labour market and fiscal policy experiments upon the labour- and credit- augmented “Schumpeter meeting Keynes” agent-based model. The labour market is declined under two institutional variants, the “Fordist” and the “Competitive” set-ups meant to capture the historical transition from the post-WWII toward the post T...

In this work we develop an agent-based model where hysteresis in major macroeconomic variables (e.g., gross domestic product, productivity, unemployment) emerges out of the decentralized interactions of heterogeneous firms and workers. Building upon the “Schumpeter meeting Keynes” family of models (cf. in particular Dosi et al. (2016b, 2017c)), we...

This work analyses the effects of labour market structural reforms by means of the labour-augmented 'Schumpeter meeting Keynes' (K+S) Agent-Based model. We introduce a policy regime change characterized by a set of structural reforms on the labour market. Confirming a recent IMF report, the model shows how structural reforms reducing workers' barga...

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, “atom-less”, independent shocks. Rather “big” episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by the fat-tailed distributions of growth rates. This applies across different levels of sectoral disag...

In this work we discuss the research findings from the labour-augmented Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K + S) agent-based model. It comprises comparative dynamics experiments on an artificial economy populated by heterogeneous, interacting agents, as workers, firms, banks and the government. The exercises are characterized by different degrees of labou...

In this work we discuss the main building blocks, achievements and challenges of an evolutionary interpretation of the relation between mechanisms of coordination and drivers of change in modern economies, seen as complex evolving systems. It is an evident stylised fact of modern economic systems that there are forces at work which keep them togeth...

Wages are an element of cost crucially affecting the competitiveness of individual firms. But the wage bill is also a crucial element of aggregate demand. Hence it could be that more “flexible” and “fluid” labour markets, while allowing for faster inter-firm reallocation of labour, may also render the whole economic system more fragile, more prone...

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation – in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity – on labor demand have proven to be not unequivocal. This essay critically reviews the role of...

Evolutionary theories of economic change identify the processes of idiosyncratic learning by individual firms and of market selection as the two main drivers of the dynamics of industries. Are such processes able to account for the statistical regularities which industrial structures and dynamics display? In this work we address this question by me...

The main task of this work is to develop a model able to encompass, at the same time, Keynesian, demand-driven, and Marxian, profit-driven, determinants of fluctuations. Our starting point is the Goodwin model (1967), rephrased in discrete time and extended by means of a full coupled dynamics structure. The model adds the combined interaction of a...