Internal Features and Agglomeration Externalities for the Hotels’ Competitiveness in Emilia-Romagna

The debate on the relationships among firm performance, heterogeneity, and agglomeration began many decades ago. Since the work of Penrose (1958), firm heterogeneity in resources and competences has been employed to explain the achievement of different levels of profitability. Wernerfelt (1984) demonstrates that the partial interfirm mobility of the different resources and capabilities are central in explaining the maintenance of competitive advantages. Moreover, the relationship between agglomeration (localization and urbanization) and productivity has spurred a vast amount of research (Rosenthal and Strange, 2004), thus providing extensive evidence of increasing returns to urban density and industry size for manufacturing industries. Focusing on different manufacturing sectors, the Italian Office of Statistics (ISTAT) has recently evidenced strongly heterogeneous dynamics in firm productivity, especially among firms belonging to different spatial clusters (ISTAT, 2014).