This paper first explores the history of famine in England as a window on living standards in the medieval and pre-industrial eras. It then considers nutrition levels and human capital endowments in England in the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Previous estimates of Italian returns to schooling suggest that female returns are higher than male returns (Lucifora-Sestito ‘93). This is a common result in other industrialized countries, as well (Blau-Kahn ‘92 e Psacharopoulos ‘94). The aim of the paper is to evaluate the stability of...

General government activity in the field of education has recently assumed new interest due to the importance of two analytical objectives: a) the existence of substitution or complementary processes between public and private expenditure in education; b) the importance of public expenditure in...

Tertiary education attainment of italian labour force, particularly in the manufacturing industry, shows empirically a large gap with respect to the other OECD countries, although human capital growth has been increasingly addressed as one of the main channel towards productivity, competitive...

Some studies that investigate the effects of migration flows –based on Solow‟s growth theory (1956) and considering the specific contribution of the human capital transfer of migrant workers (Mankiw e al. 1992; Dolado e al. 1994, Piras, 1996) –allow to evaluate the negative...

We study the role of human capital in the restructuring of the Italian economy. The share of university graduates in the population has long been far lower in Italy (12 per cent in 2007) that in the rest of Europe (24 per cent). The 3+2 reform of Italian degree programmes has significantly...

This paper aims to analyze the Italian University’s physical and human cognitive assets. First we focus on the continuous reductions in public funding (CNVSU, 2011; OECD, 2010) that constrained the Italian university to develop 'entrepreneurial skills', in other words due to the lack of...