We analyse the effects of an active labour market program for disadvantaged workers recently implemented in an Italian depressed area. Our sample includes 859 workers, mostly women, who entered the program before April 2008 and were subsequently interviewed in 2009-10. We complement the existing...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service - health, educational...

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at...

Among the determinants of the growth and convergence processes identified by the theoretical literature, human capital is certainly one of the most important. This paper offers a selective survey of the more recent contributions of the theory of human capital and growth. In particular, our aim...

This paper adopts a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to take into account both TFP and neoclassical convergence. We use a sample of 76 countries, 1960-2003 and estimate TFP values obtained by using different estimators such as LSDV, Kiviet-corrected LSDV, and GMM à la Arellano and...

Quantifying productivity is a conditio sine qua non for empirical analysis in a number of research fields. The identification of the measure that best fits with the specific goals of the analysis, as well as being data-driven, is currently complicated by the fact that an array of methodologies...

This paper estimates returns to schooling at Spanish regional level. We identify two different convergence clubs of rich/educated and poor/uneducated regions. Overall our results stress the importance of the relationship existing between the level of development of an economy and returns to...

Despite the abundance of different econometric techniques introduced in the empirical literature on convergence, it is usually assumed that shocks are uncorrelated across countries. This is surely unlikely for most of the datasets considered and we investigate a possibility so far ignored,...

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital for the Italian regions in a convergence regression framework. We confirm the usual result...

Using Italian data on language standardized tests for different levels of schooling we investigate 1) if the observed gap in educational attainments in first generation immigrants tends to lower the longer their stay in Italy and 2) if younger children reduce the gap faster than their older...