This paper provides technical documentation to accompany the NBER manufacturing productivity (MP) database. The database contains information on 450 4-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1958 through 1991. The data are compiled from various official sources, most notably the Annual...

We study the relation between workers' skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique dataset of Italian manufacturing firms from the early eighties to the late nineties with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker's effect obtained as a...

Using firm-level based TFP indicators (as opposed to employment-based proxies) we estimate the effects of alternative sources of dynamic externalities at the local level. In contrast to previous empirical work, we find that industrial specialization and scale indicators affect TFP growth...