Post-war Italy provides an interesting case to test for recent contributions on economic growth which play down the relevance of physical capital per se and stress its complementarity with infrastructure and less tangible factors such as finance and human capital. In truth, behind the remarkable...

To explain the concentration of human capital in cities, urban theory conjectures that the metropolitan scale provides two sources of returns for the more educated; production benefits, both in terms of wages and non-monetary gains, and consumption benefits. By exploiting a unique survey on...

The paper provides an empirical investigation of labor market pooling. The analysis concentrates on Italian industrial districts and shows that there is fragmentary evidence of a widespread wage premium. In particular, there is no evidence of district differentials for the returns to seniority...

The problems of Italy�s education system mostly stem from its modus operandi and interactions with the expectations of families and students. The recent signs of improvement in Italian students� proficiency, plausibly reflecting greater emphasis on rigour, could be reinforced by making...

In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one�s ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes� rule, eventually learning their...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effects of the expansion of tertiary education supply on the educational choices of young Italian high school graduates. A quasi-experimental setting given by the reform of the tertiary education system implemented in 2001 is exploited. The reform was...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...

Recent literature has aimed at evaluating human capital externalities by estimating the effect of human capital on wages at urban level. We argue that this methodology might not identify properly human capital spillovers. We consider a general equilibrium model based on Roback (1982) where both...

This paper explores the growth-enhancing role played by heterogeneity in human capital accumulation. It develops a growth model that takes into account more than one mechanism for accumulating human capital; in particular, schooling and on-the-job training are considered. The paper demonstrates...

Both macro and (still scarce) micro evidence support the idea that a new economy is emerging in the US, not (yet) in Europe. Some have argued that the inadequacies of Europe�s financial system are an important part of the explanation. This paper, after surveying the existing literature on...