This paper assesses the impact of Research and Development (R&D) efforts on production in the North and Centre-South of Italy by using a panel of 1,203 manufacturing firms over the period 1998–2003. The estimations are based on a nonlinear translog production function augmented by a measure of...

We exploit a series of discontinuities, at several population thresholds, in the allocation mechanism of federal transfers to municipal governments in Brazil to identify the causal effect of municipal spending on local labor markets, using a ‘fuzzy' regression discontinuity design. Our...

Building on the Kumar and Russell (2002) methodology, we propose a conditional frontier approach which allows singling out the role of technology gap in explaining labour productivity differences. We find convergence in labour productivity growth driven by capital accumulation and technical...