Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/74043 
Year of Publication: 
2007
Series/Report no.: 
Nota di Lavoro No. 58.2007
Publisher: 
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), Milano
Abstract: 
Aim of this paper is to study whether and how the firm’s decision to outsource production activities affects its technological performance. In particular, we look at how the alignment between the firm’s governance strategy and the underlying attributes of the transactions affects the capacity of the firm to introduce new products and processes. Using microeconomic data on a repeated cross-section of Italian manufacturing firms for the period 1998-2003, we develop a two-stage approach: first, we estimate the determinants of the firm’s organizational governance (production outsourcing); second, we incorporate a measure of governance misalignment into a technological performance relation. We find (i) that firms not aligned with the optimal organizational governance perform less well in terms of process innovation than more aligned competitors, but (ii) that misalignment has a positive effect on product innovation. However, this counterintuitive result is strongly characterized by non-linear effects that reverse the latter correlation for high values of governance misfit.
Subjects: 
Production Outsourcing
Organizational Governance
Misalignment
Technological Performance
Non-Linearity
JEL: 
L23
L24
L25
O31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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