Europe is faced with serious problems of slow growth and little employment creation. Are the two problems related at all? Our proposed answer is: yes, they are. Building on Daveri and Tabellini (1997), we developed an infinite-horizon model with endogenous growth due to learning-by-doing and...

To the layman, the upward trend in European unemployment is related to the slowdown in economic growth. We argue that the layman's view is correct. The increase in European unemployment and the slowdown in economic growth are related, because they stem from a common cause: an excessively high...

Aggregate data from the regions of Southern Italy are used to test whether risk is a significant determinant of the decision to migrate abroad or inside the country. This indeed appears to be the case for both foreign and domestic migrations, after controlling for unemployment and wage...

Data on IT spending and investment unambiguously show that the European Union as a whole has eventually caught up with the United States in recent years. Throughout 1992-2001, two thirds of the EU population reached - or came much closer to - the same levels of IT diffusion as the United States....

Employees of "globalized" firms face a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, menu of labor market outcomes. We document this neglected trade-off of globalization for a sample of Indian manufacturing firms. On the one hand, the employees of firms subject to foreign competition face a more...

The extraordinary success of the U.S. economy and the parallel growth slowdown of the large European countries and Japan in the 1990s bear a simple rationale. The United States has eventually benefited from the effective adoption of information technologies. The introduction of the newly...

We study the relation between the off-shoring of intermediates and services and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries in 1995-2003. Our results indicate that the off-shoring of intermediates within the same industry (“narrow off-shoring”) is beneficial for productivity...

This paper explores the quantitative plausibility of three candidate explanations for the European productivity slowdown with respect to the US. The empirical plausibility of the common wisdom on the topic (the "IT usage" hypothesis) is found to crucially depend on how IT-using industries are...

Is the process of workforce aging a burden or a blessing for the firm? Our paper seeks to answer this question by providing evidence on the age-productivity and age-earnings profiles for a sample of plants in three manufacturing industries (“forest”, “industrial machinery” and...

The Italian economy is often said to be on a declining path. In this paper, we document that: (i) Italy’s current decline is a labor productivity problem (ii) the labor productivity slowdown stems from declining productivity growth in all industries but utilities (with manufacturing...