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This paper investigates the effects of investment subsidies on the accumulation decisions of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We use survey information on the subjective evaluation of the investment activity that the recipient firm would have undertaken, had it not been financed. We find that the effectiveness of subsidies to stimulate investment is limited. Without subsidies, three quarters of the financed firms would have carried out the same amount of investment at the same date; the remaining share of firms would have mostly carried out the same amount of investment in a future date.

The paper, using the Bank of Italy's survey on manufacturing firms, fills a gap on actual per capita working time data. Per capita working hours increased by 10 per cent from 1985 to 1998, despite a small reduction in contractual working time. Labour and capacity were greatly under-utilised only until 1992-93, when both a sudden and strong decline in per capita working hours and a gradual reduction in employment took place. Subsequently, per capita hours actually worked have been holding steady at very high levels and employers have adapted the input of labour to cyclical production spikes by exploiting the recently greater flexibility of employment. The broad diffusion of fixed-term contracts played a major role It emerges that the rate of growth of the hourly productivity has been slower than in per capita terms and more regular, especially after 1994. International comparisons are therefore less favourable for Italy, because in the other leading European countries, in the last 10 years, per capita working hours in the industrial sectors fluctuated cyclically around constant means or declined.

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate information available from industry statistics of Eurostat or EU KLEMS, the paper provides information on the distribution of firms across several dimensions related to competitiveness, e.g. productivity and size. The database comprises so far 11 countries, with information for 58 sectors over the period 1995-2011. The paper documents the development of the new research infrastructure, describes the database, and shows some preliminary results. Among them, it shows that there is large heterogeneity in terms of firm productivity or size within narrowly defined industries in all countries. Productivity, and above all, size distribution are very skewed across countries, with a thick left-tail of low productive firms. Moreover, firms at both ends of the distribution show very different dynamics in terms of productivity and unit labour costs. Within-sector heterogeneity and productivity dispersion are positively correlated to aggregate productivity given the possibility of reallocating resources from less to more productive firms. To this extent, we show how allocative efficiency varies across countries, and more interestingly, over different periods of time. Finally, we apply the new database to illustrate the importance of productivity dispersion to explain aggregate trade results. JEL Classification: L11, L25, D24, O4, O57