Young highly educated workers developed in the 70's and 80's a preference for working in larger cities. As a consequence highly educated young workers in 1990 were over-represented in cities, in spite of the lower wage premium they earned for working in crowded metropolitan areas if compared to...

In an interesting and influential paper Robert Lucas (1993) considering the experience of East Asian small economies, suggests that on the job" learning could be the principal engine of their miraculous growth in the last 20 years. In this paper I develop an overlapping generation model where on...

The diffusion of knowledge in the world generates positive externalities if knowledge flows increase the productivity of R&D. Our work analyzes knowledge diffusion and knowledge externalities in generating innovation and in determining productivity. We first estimate the determinants of...

Using a comprehensive and newly organized dataset the present article shows that the human capital content of emigrants from Italy significantly increased during the 1990's . This is even more dramatically the case if we consider emigrating college graduates, whose share relative to total...

The importance of innovation for the economic performance of industrialized countries has been largely stressed recently by the theoretical and empirical literature. Moreover the intensity of knowledge externalities in generating innovation, is the key parameter in determining sustained growth...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

In this article we estimate the long-run aggregate elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled workers. This is an important parameter as it allows us to compute the skill biased technological progress (SBTP) from the evolution of relative wages. However, it is hard to estimate...