Industrial Structure and the European Productivity Growth Divergence

Europe is facing an underlying productivity gap between north and south. One reason
for this could be the industrial structures. The EU-funded ISEProD project will merge
insights and new techniques from industrial organisation and corporate finance to
assess the causes and consequences of different industrial structures. Specifically,
the project will pursue four different work packages. The first concerns the role of firm
ownership, control and risk taking. The second reviews skills supply and the effects
of the education of entrepreneurs and managers. The third is the industrial structure,
as well as input/output relationships with IT adoption. The fourth is access to finance
with asymmetric information and imperfectly competitive financial markets.