This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of the relationship between human capital composition and economic growth and points to the importance of tertiary education in the explanation of growth for developing countries. In the theoretical analysis, we allow for non-constant...

Europe 2020 strategy and the initiative “Innovation Union” call for a particular attention at the territorial dimension of innovation and knowledge creation. The heterogeneity across regions in their capacity to create knowledge and innovation, but also in their abilities to exploit ideas...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of various proximity dimensions on the innovative capacity of 276 regions in Europe within a knowledge production function model, where R&D and human capital are included as the main internal inputs. We combine the standard geographical...

The paper studies a two-sector economy with investments in human and physical capital and imperfect labor markets. Workers and firms endogenously select (paying a fixed cost) the sector they are active in, and choose the amount of their investments. The economy is characterized by pecuniary...

This paper estimates returns to schooling at Spanish regional level. We identify two different convergence clubs of rich/educated and poor/uneducated regions. Overall our results stress the importance of the relationship existing between the level of development of an economy and returns to...

The paper examines the relationship between human capital and productivity growth with reference to the Italian regions. Two approaches can be distinguished. One belonging to the neoclassical tradition stresses the accumulation of human capital as a determinant of growth, while the other,...

This paper analyses the growth effects of high levels of human capital at the industry level. By favouring technology adoption, human-capital-intensive industries grow faster compared to less human-capital-intensive industries in economies that have higher levels of human capital. Using data for...

In the last decade there has been an upsurge of studies on international comparisons of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). The empirical evidence suggests that countries and regions differ not only in traditional factor endowments (labour and physical capital) but mainly in productivity and...

This paper adopts a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to take into account both TFP and neoclassical convergence. We use a sample of 76 countries, 1960-2003 and estimate TFP values obtained by using different estimators such as LSDV, Kiviet-corrected LSDV, and GMM à la Arellano and...

Employing a large data set of manufacturing firms the paper tries to assess the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on productivity growth in Italy and to investigate the differences in ICT adoption between North and South of the country. Not all firms invest in ICT and...