Tertiary education attainment of italian labour force, particularly in the manufacturing industry, shows empirically a large gap with respect to the other OECD countries, although human capital growth has been increasingly addressed as one of the main channel towards productivity, competitive...

Previous estimates of Italian returns to schooling suggest that female returns are higher than male returns (Lucifora-Sestito ‘93). This is a common result in other industrialized countries, as well (Blau-Kahn ‘92 e Psacharopoulos ‘94). The aim of the paper is to evaluate the stability of...