We study six high tech areas in the Mezzogiorno through in-depth field research. The starting point of these industrial systems is always the opening of a large new plant owned by a large firm. Other large firms follow, together with new locally-owned small and medium enterprises. These...

This paper analyses the contribution of human capital, measured using the share of residents holding a college degree, to urban growth, gauged by the growth in employment, between 1981 and 2001. According to our estimates, starting with a ten per cent higher share of college-educated residents...

Human capital is typically viewed as generating a number of desirable outcomes, including economic growth. Yet, in spite of its importance, few empirical studies have explored why some economies accumulate more human capital than others. This paper attempts to do so using a sample of more than...

This paper analyses the hypothesis under which the improvement on the educational level in the last few decades has also increased the velocity of income convergence for the Brazilian Regions. The originality of this paper, associated with its microrregional delimitation, contributes to a...

We utilize county-level data to explore the roles of different types of human capital accumulation in U.S. growth determination. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. The large number of observations provides enough degrees of freedom to...

Bridging the gap between the literatures on industrial change and human capital externalities we investigate the joint importance of aggregate regional education and job turnover for productivity effects to arise within firms and regional industries. On the level of regional industries we find...

This paper examines differences in the skill content of work throughout the United States, ranging from densely populated city centers to isolated and sparsely populated rural areas. To do so, we classify detailed geographic areas into categories along the entire urban-rural hierarchy. An...

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of regional convergence in Canada based on the growth model of Barro, Mankiw and Sala-i-Martin (1995). In an open economy with perfect capital mobility, if domestic residents cannot borrow abroad with human capital as collateral, the dynamics of human...

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this...

This paper investigates the conditional convergence of both human capital indicators and nominal per capita income across Canadian provinces in a panel-data empirical framework. Long-run relative provincial steady states are determined by relative rates of urbanization, onetime shocks to...