The aim of this paper is to assess the role played by creativity and other components of human capital on the process of economic growth for 257 regions in the 27 member countries of the European Union. We first decompose the regional human capital endowment to distinguish between the...

The paper examines the relationship between human capital and productivity growth with reference to the Italian regions. Two approaches can be distinguished. One belonging to the neoclassical tradition stresses the accumulation of human capital as a determinant of growth, while the other,...

The picture on disparities in productivity growth and in unemployment across European regions reveals the existence of a slow and not very systematic convergence of labor productivity toward a common level, and of an even more uncertain convergence of unemployment rates. This paper uses a...

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate...

We investigate the factors behind the recent decline in the U.S. share of world merchandise exports in an attempt to determine how big a role the changing productivity of U.S. firms has played. We do so against the backdrop of a measure of cost competitiveness which, insofar it is inferred from...

Recent theoretical models predict gains from international trade coming from intra-industry reallocations, due to a firm selection effect. In this paper we answer two related questions. First, what is the magnitude of this selection effect, and how does it compare to that of intra-national...

In models with heterogeneous …rms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best …rms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of …rm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

This paper studies the equilibrium dynamics of a growth model with public finance where two different allocations of public resources are considered. The model simultaneously determines the optimal shares of consumption, capital accumulation, taxes and composition of the two different public...

We analyze the interaction between bank and market finance in a model where bankers gather information through monitoring and screening.We show that,if a market is established characterized by a disclosure law such that entrepreneurs wishing to raise market finance can credibly disclose their...

This paper develops a non-linear theoretical relationship between public spending and economic growth. The model identifies the “optimal” size of government and the “optimal” composition of government spending. Given the size of the government, different allocations of public resources...