From fashion to sustainability: the key role of industrial districts

Silvia Rita Sedita () and Amir Maghssudipour ()
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Silvia Rita Sedita: Dept. of Economics and Management, University of Padova
Amir Maghssudipour: Dept. of Economics and Management, University of Padova

INVESTIGACIONES REGIONALES - Journal of REGIONAL RESEARCH, 2024, issue 60, 117-132

Abstract: Sustainability issues are increasingly influencing firms’ decision making, leading to the creation of new business models for finding solutions to environmental and societal challenges. This work aims to explore what is the role played by industrial districts in firms’ orientation towards sustainability. It implements a Propensity Score Matching technique on a novel datatabase with information on 1300 Italian fashion firms. Their sustainability orientation is measured using the Quantitas Intelligent Business Analyzer (QIBA), an original Natural Language Processing-based data mining technique, which allows scraping firms' websites and analyzing their content adopting a Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency weighting scheme. Findings suggest the existence of a sustainability-driven industrial district effect, i.e. a positive association between the sustainability orientation of fashion firms and their localization in industrial districts.

Keywords: Fashion; Environmental sustainability; Social sustainability; Natural Language Processing; Industrial districts; Made in Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M00 Q01 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:invreg:0547

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