Three essays on the role of public policies in firm performance

This Ph.D. project thesis is a collection of three autonomous works tied by a common focus, that is to inquire the role public sector – within the peculiar Italian context – may exert to improve firms’ performance, thus supporting the aggregate growth in country’s economy. The first two works relates to public procurement, the main tool within the demand-side policy measures, which is object of a revitalized interest in both policymakers and scholars. In the first work I investigate whether those Italian firms engaging in public procurement report a larger propensity to innovate with respect to their counterparts that exclusively target private customers, paying mainly at- tention on how any effect varies with the amount of public procurement a firm is engaged into. In the second work, which represents an extension of the previous one, the scope is enlarged in order to investigate whether municipal procurement, that is that promoted by Municipalities, affects firms (in terms of higher productivity) localized within the same municipal borders. This investigation grounds on a comprehensive dataset that merges the rich panel information about Italian firms – provided by RIL surveys – with more than a million of official administrative data on all the public tenders awarded in Italy between 2010-2018, provided by the Italian anti-corruption agency (ANAC). In the last work, the attention is shifted towards the way with whom firms manage their labor force to enhance their innovative performance. This work, which grounds its premises on the numerous reforms of labor market that followed one another in the last two decades, represents a first attempt with respect to the Italian context to look at three dimensions of numerical flexibility at the same time and to explore some potential channels capable to mediate the relation between numerical flexibility and innovation.