We study the behavior of individuals coming from different geographic regions of Italy, in a same public good game. We confirm previous findings according to which, faced with the same incentives and experimental conditions, Southern citizens exhibit a lower propensity to cooperate than Northern...

By adopting the evolutionary approach to resilience, this paper discusses and empirically investigate the determinants of the ability of region to resist, absorb, and react to recessionary shocks. The recent 2008 Great Recession has extremely affected most of the advanced economies all over the...

New enabling technologies are shaping the transformation of production activities. This process of change is characterised by growing digitization, inter-connectivity and automation. The diffusion of new technologies is, however, very uneven, and firms display different adoption behaviours. By...

This paper quantitatively assesses to what extent signatures in marriage certificates can inform about literacy rates in pre-industrial states. The direct estimates are based on a novel and balanced random sample of marriage certificates for pre-unification Italy in 1815. Such figures are...

This article investigates the role of technology, education and wages in shaping the skill structure of employment considering the upswings and downswings of business cycles. We develop an econometric estimation of these relationships and carry out an empirical test at the industry level for...

This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world's largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that the level...

A swelling stream of literature employs age-heaping as an indicator of human capital, more specifically of numeracy. We re-examine this connection in light of evidence drawn from nineteenth century Italy: census data, death records, and direct, qualitative evidence on age-awareness and numeracy....

How do trade activities affect firms’ employment and wages structures? Using firm level data on Italian manufacturing firms, this paper adds to the existing literature, by assessing how the degree of involvement in international trade impacts on workforce composition, earning levels and wage...

The capability-based view of the firm is based on the assumption that firms know how to do things. Assuming the existence of a thing called `organizational knowledge', in the first part of the paper we identify its main building blocks and we provide a description of its inner structure. This...

It is widely recognized that advances in knowhow have been the key driving force between the great improvements in human material well-being that have been achieved over the past two centuries. However, not much attention has been directed to the fact that the advances in knowhow that have been...