Filippo Berti Mecocci
PhD Candidate in Development Economics and Local Systems (DELoS)
University of Florence
Contact me: e-mail
Curriculum Vitae: Download
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Development Economics and Local Systems (DELoS) at the University of Florence under the supervision of prof. Marco Bellandi. From January 2025 I have a research fellowship at the University of Florence about the life science industry in Tuscany. I am interested in the causes and consequences of industrial agglomeration. In my dissertation, I focus on the Italian dynamics of manufacturing growth led by external economies. I am also interested in how macroeconomic trends affect the geography of production.
I was the visiting research assistant of prof. Giulio Buciuni at Trinity College Dublin in 2024. I had a research fellowship at the University of Florence from 2020 to 2021 on cultural economics and artificial intelligence.
Papers in Regional Science, 2022 with Amir Maghssudipour and Marco Bellandi
Cultural and creative production (CCP) can create, renovate, and shape places' socio‐economic environments. Recent contributions suggest that culture can activate a set of cognitive and productive mechanisms that form the basis of human capital (HC) dynamics. Bridging these two streams of research, the present paper investigates possible causal relationships between CCP and HC at the regional level. Empirically, we used measures of employment in the cultural and creative sectors as proxies for CCP and applied generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimations to yearly data from 283 European NUTS 2 regions from 2014 to 2020. The findings suggest that CCP positively affects regions' average levels of HC even controlling for several economic and demographic factors.
Forthcoming in Industrial and Corporate Change with Amir Maghssudipour
Aging affects workers' productivity following an inverted U-shaped relationship. However, the adverse effects of an aging population can be offset by endogenous technological adaptations at the aggregate level. Despite this, we know little about the intricate relationships operating at the regional level between aging, localized external economies and their effects on productivity. To fill this gap, we rely on data about manufacturing firms across eight European countries at the Nuts-2 level and adopt an instrumental variable approach to deal with residual endogeneity. Our findings indicate that while the impact of aging on productivity is positive, localized external effects on productivity disappear when the proportion of the workforce in the older age bracket reaches 19.68% for specialization economies and 24.28% for urbanization economies.
with Roberto Dellisanti and Amir Maghssudipour
Social innovation has become an increasingly significant concept within the field of innovation studies and in its practical applications in the real world. While theoretical and case-study literature highlights the role of contextual factors in driving social innovation, quantitative research on larger volume of data at the regional level is currently lacking. After documenting that it mainly concentrates in urban areas, this study fills this gap with both theoretical and empirical contributions. Conceptually, it links accumulated human capital and population density to the diffusion of social innovation, hypothesizing that (1) social innovations emerge in knowledge domains tied to regional technological specialization, and (2) population density fosters it through clustering benefits such as knowledge spillovers. Empirically, based on an original database constructed using information from the ESID-RISIS dataset and applying two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable techniques, the analysis shows that density is the strongest driver: an increase of 1,200 inhabitants per square kilometer (one standard deviation) generates 1.85 additional social innovation projects. In contrast, no significant link is found between accumulated human capital and social innovation across regions.
Local multipliers by plant size: the case of Italy, with Marco Bellandi
New jobs in tradable sectors generate additional jobs in non--tradable sectors. This paper extends the theory of local multipliers to account for heterogeneity across plant size classes. Large firms pay wage premia that increase local demand for non--tradable goods and services. Small firms rely on local subcontracting, which creates other tradable jobs in the local value chain. We take advantage of the case of the Italian economy over the period 2012--2020. Over a ten-year period, there has been a significant shift in the size composition of tradable industries, with notable changes in the distribution of and employment accounted for by micro, small, medium, and large plants. Using data on personnel and plants across local labor market areas in Italy, our contribution to the previous literature is twofold. First, we extend the conceptual framework of local multipliers by allowing for variation across plant size classes. Second, after accounting for potential endogeneity due to local common shocks, we estimate separate coefficients for each plant size class. Our results suggest heterogeneous multipliers by size, with small and large plants having stronger magnitudes. The joint contribution of such heterogeneous multipliers allows to explain 40.2\% of the variation in the increase of non-tradable jobs after an increase in tradable jobs, which is larger than with an aggregate multiplier.
Competition and external economies, 2nd Chapter of the PhD Thesis
As an industry expands, tasks can be divided. New specialized skills emerge, workers absorb them, and external economies in the form of knowledge spillovers are generated via labor flows between firms. While the recent empirical literature is disconnected from the tradition of economic theory, such attempts to estimate spillovers are far from unanimous. This paper endeavors to bridge the theoretical and empirical literature on external economies by developing an oligopsonistic model in the local labor market. The second part of the paper shows that empirics and theory can be reconciled from a methodological point of view. It then develops a two-step econometric procedure to incorporate an interaction term between competition and specialization into the traditional estimation of the effect of external economies on total factor productivity (TFP). Using firm-level and confidential plant-level data for a large cross-section of Italian local labor market areas and a period of reduced local competition due to the influx of large manufacturing firms, this paper assesses the extent to which competition moderates the effect of specialization on local TFP. Endogeneity concerns regarding the quality and quantity of labor and TFP due to the simultaneity of productivity shocks and input choice are also addressed. The results suggest that even in an oligopsonistic market, competition is a necessary condition to benefit from external economies. There are thresholds of competition above which external economies in the labor market peter out. The $HHI$ thresholds for competition range from 14.5 to 15.8. Finally, there are implications for the unit of local industry analysis when considering the labor market.
Global shocks, local responses, 3rd Chapter of the PhD Thesis
When a global shock hits a national economy, places react differently. Differences in shock responses depend on local economic structures. In this paper, I focus on the role of local input-output linkages in the manufacturing sector in responding to crises. I use a dataset on Italian local labor market areas covering the period 2006-2022 to assess differences in unemployment responses to common shocks. I use national input-output tables as well as confidential plant-level data to proxy cross-sectional variation in local manufacturing input-output flows. Using shocks due to the financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, I assess the additional effect of a local IO linkages on unemployment rates. After partialling-out the role of manufacturing specialization, which is highly sensitive to global demand, if a residual effect is found, it depends on the additional effect propagating through the input-output network. Taking advantage of a DiD setting, I find that LMAs with strong manufacturing input-output linkages suffer a 4\% higher increase in unemployment relative to LMAs with weak IO.
Three essays on local industrial growth, supervisor: Marco Bellandi
This thesis focuses on the impact of external economies on economic performance resulting from the geographic concentration of manufacturing activities.
In particular, I focus on several aspects of economic performance, such as unemployment fluctuations, productivity, and employment growth; on factors that facilitate external economies, such as competition and local structures; on a specific geographic unit of study, the local labor market area (LMA, divided into industrial districts and other areas); and on manufacturing as a variable that affects local growth (through basic to non-basic multipliers) as well as a variable that is affected by local characteristics.
The interest in the manufacturing sector as the main engine of growth at the local and national level and in the Italian case has had the effect of directing my analysis towards a specific unit of analysis.
If the geographical concentration refers to the Italian case, industrial districts become the natural unit of investigation, since most of the manufacturing activity is concentrated in them.
Recently, these areas have experienced dramatic changes in their industrial structure due to the influx of large firms.
While this is not a problem per se, since large firms bring with them higher levels of own efficiency relative to smaller firms, it is a potential threat to localized external economies due to inter-firms division of labor, knowledge spillover and labor pooling.
The thesis is divided into three main parts.
The first part is introductory.
The second part contains the three original articles.
The last part summarizes the main findings, provides some original policy implications and gives an overview of my future research perspective.
Each part has two chapters, except for the second part, which has three.
The introduction of the dissertation is an attempt to give a sketchy idea of the relevance of the spatial division of labor for the Italian manufacturing sector, where I also discuss theoretically relevant policy implications.
The first chapter documents that when tradable (manufacturing + extraction) firms enter a local market, they create additional jobs in non-tradable sectors.
It analyzes this mechanism by looking at the size of firms entering the local market.
Chapter two provides an analytical model for and analyzes the effect of geographic concentration of manufacturing on local TFP and the role of local competition in moderating such an effect.
Chapter three empirically estimates the differential impact of global shocks on LMAs according to the strength of input-output linkages among manufacturing sectors.
Finally, there is a conclusion based on three blocks.
The first block summarizes and provides an overview of the main contributions of the three original chapters of the thesis.
The second block retrieves the main estimates obtained in each chapter to document the existence of a trade-off between employment and productivity growth when looking at the national effect of place-based policies.
Finally, the third block offers a perspective on my future research.
In what follows, I focus on summarizing the three original chapters of the dissertation.
with Vieri Calogero
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