The purpose of this note is to document how we constructed annual series for average educational attainment in the 20 Italian administrative regions throughout the 1970-1998 period. These annual data are disaggregated by gender and by eight sectors (Agriculture, Energy, Manufacturing,...

Using a data-set of OECD countries from 1980 to 2004, we assess the cross-country evidence on the trade-off between wage inequality and employment performance by relying on Data Envelopment Analysis, a nonparametric technique usually employed in the analysis of productive efficiency. DEA allows...

English Abstract: This note aims to provide an initial assessment of the territorial labor-market data reconstructed under the aegis of the SVIMEZ initiative for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. Various time series were reconstructed within the 150-year time range going from...

In this paper we assess the evolution of labor-market performance in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) over the last decade. We provide a survey of the literature dealing with labor-market performance in the OECD, finding that, while this literature tends to...

In this paper we assess the evolution of employment and wage inequality in Europe and the US labour markets over the past two decades. We find that the salient trends in wage structures are more complicated than implied by the so-called “unified theory.” Furthermore there is no clear...

It has often been observed in the literature that non-parametric approaches to the estimation of production frontiers are hardly robust in the presence of outliers. This paper proposes a class of robust frontier estimators based upon extreme value theory. The nature of the proposed method is...

In this paper, we analyse the impact of business incentives on the technical efficiency of Italian manufacturing firms. Using DEA allows a novel treatment of the omitted-variable and sample-selection bias. Through DEA one carries out direct comparisons between similar observations akin to those...

In this paper, we estimate indices of technological catch-up, technological change and variations in scale efficiency for a sample of 52 countries through the FDH approach with variable scaling parameters (VP-FDH) proposed in Kerstens and Vanden Eeckaut (1999). We compare the results with those...

This paper tests the existence of a Beveridge Curve across the economies of nine OECD countries from 1980 to 2011, investigating the impact of various kinds of structural factors (technological progress, globalisation, oil prices) and of the current recession on the Curve. Technological progress...

This note is intended to provide an initial assessment of the potentialities of the data reconstruction work, relating to labour market series, carried out as part of the SVIMEZ volume for the Sesquicentennial of the Unification of Italy. To this end, we develop some considerations on a key...