Coerenza D'Impresa E Diversificazione Settoriale: Un'Applicazione Alle Società Leaders Nell'Industria Manifatturiera Europea

In this paper the measure of corporate coherence proposed by Teece, Rumelt, Dosi and Winter (1994) and the measure of inter-industry relatedness on which the former is built are analysed using a dataset that includes the five largest European producers in 100 3-digit NACE industries. The theoretical assumptions are discussed critically and the upper and lower bounds of both distributions are found. The empirical analysis shows that a strict positive relation between the frequency with which activities are combined within the same corporation - i.e. the degree of interindustry relatedness - and the technological and market similarities of those activities exists, in the sense that the more similar or complementary are the characteristics of the industries, in terms of technologies, skills, R&D and advertising expenses, the more related are the industries themselves. Corporate coherence is found to be negatively related to the degree of diversification. On average Italian firms are more coherent than their competitors in other European countries. However if we restrict the analysis to the largest firms we find that Italian firms are more diversified and less coherent than the others. In conclusion, a very polarized distribution of Italian firms emerges in which highly coherent small/medium sized firms operating in traditional industries coexist with large uncoherent conglomerates, both public and private.