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This article explores the application to Italy of Goldin’s hypothesis that the unexplained gender pay gap is crucially linked to firms’ incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who work long and particular hours. The study draws mainly on Italian responses to the 2014 European Structure of Earnings Survey for data on earnings and the individual characteristics of employees and their employer, but also uses data from the Occupational Information Network and the Italian Sample Survey on Professions to measure characteristics reflecting the work context within occupations. For graduate and non-graduate workers, the results reveal a positive relationship between various measures of the unexplained gender pay gap and the elasticity of earnings with respect to work hours. For graduate workers, in accordance with Goldin’s hypothesis, both these variables are correlated with the occupational characteristics that impose earnings penalties on workers seeking more workplace flexibility.

We assess the impact of regional policies on the economies of the 20 Italian regions for the period 1994–2016. We adopt a control function approach incorporating the funds’ allocation rules and ascertain the impact of various policy funds in four sectors (agriculture, industry, construction and services) through a multi-input multi-output transformation function. We find that European Structural and Investment Funds have a significant impact on various sectoral components of regional gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, with the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) playing the strongest role. Nationally funded regional policies do not have an aggregate impact but affect the sectoral composition of GDP.

This study aims to contribute to the recent literature on the effects of COVID on football teams’ performance, focusing on the impact of ghost games on offensive and defensive technical efficiency. Using season-level data for the top 5 European leagues, a novelty for efficiency studies on football, the analysis compares the ten seasons played before the pandemic outbreak with the only season (2020-21) almost entirely played behind closed doors. A further novel contribution is the methodology – conditional order-m – applied to calculate efficiency scores. Our results show that in the post-COVID season both offensive and defensive efficiency significantly increased for away games, whereas for home games offensive efficiency shows a very slight increase, and defensive efficiency remains basically unchanged. These findings are valid for all the five leagues and provide evidence of a generalised reduction in the home advantage.

This paper analyzes the effects of cohesion policies on the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the 20 Italian administrative regions for the period 1994–2013. The analysis includes both European Union and national funds. It estimates average partial effects through a control-function approach based on the funds’ allocation rules, and allows for the role of the regional environment on the impact of regional policies. A positive impact of European Union funds is found, as well as a less significant impact of (nationally financed) subsidies to firms. Quality of government has no relevance for European Union funds, but it enhances the impact of subsidies to firms.

This paper analyses the Beveridge curve across twelve OECD countries from 1985 to 2013. Besides allowing for some customary labour-market institutions, we assess the role of technological progress and globalisation, as well as of the current recession, on the curve. Significant institutional variables include unemployment benefits, the tax wedge, minimum wages, and, to a lesser extent, employment protection legislation (the latter improving the unemployment-vacancies trade-off). Technological progress has a complex impact. R&D intensity worsens matching efficiency, producing evidence in support of a creative destruction effect, while an index of total factor productivity has the opposite effect. Unlike in previous work, we find a favourable impact of globalisation. The curve parameters are stable throughout the 2008–2013 period, once we allow for country-specific shifts in the curve coincidental with the Great Recession. On the other hand, there is no common shift of the curve that can be associated with the Great Recession.

This paper examines whether Euro Area countries would have faced a more favorable inflation output variability tradeoff without the Euro. We provide evidence that this claim is true for the periods of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. For the Euro Area as a whole, the deterioration of the tradeoff becomes insignificant with Draghi’s ‘whatever it takes’ announcement onwards. However, our more detailed analysis shows that the detrimental effect of the Euro is more severe for peripheral Euro Area countries and that ECB policies have been less effective for these countries. These findings point to structural differences among Euro Area countries as the explanation of the detrimental effect of the Euro as ECB policies can be denoted ‘one size must fit all’ policies. We base our results on a novel empirical strategy that, consistent with monetary theory, models the joint determination of the variability of inflation and output conditional on structural supply shocks. Moreover, our findings are robust to potential endogeneity concerns related to adopting the Euro.

This paper tests the existence of a Beveridge Curve across the economies of nineteen OECD countries from 1980 to 2007, investigating the impact of technological progress and globalisation on the unemployment-vacancies trade-off. We find largely favourable evidence for the existence of a OECD Beveridge Curve. Lagged values of technological progress (R&D intensity) shift the Curve outwards, producing evidence in support of the creative destruction effect. Lagged values of a globalisation index also shift the Curve outwards, worsening the unemployment-vacancies trade-off. On the other hand, capital per worker shifts the Curve inwards both in the short and in the long run. Significant institutional variables include coordination bargaining, and, less consistently, unemployment benefits or employment protection. Including in the Curve structural indicators (such as technological progress and globalisation) as well as institutional variables is needed to obtain a satisfactory specification.

This chapter is part of a book exploring the condition of young people in the labour market in European countries. The outcome of the project, 'The political economy of youth unemployment', the book investigates questions such as which structural conditions and labour market institutions guarantee better youth performance, which education systems and school-to-work processes are more effective and in which countries is gender differentiation less of an issue.

Youth are a vulnerable category of workers, since they are in a delicate phase of their working life, the first entry in the labour market. Young graduates and early school leavers are involved in the school–to–work transition process, whose duration considerably varies across countries. In this paper we explore the impact of labour-market and educational institutions on youth labour-market performance across OECD countries for the 1985–2012 period. We extend to 2012 the CEP–OECD dataset and match it with series about youth population, schooling and the vocational education and training participation rates from OECD and World Bank. We estimate a dynamic panel model, building upon Bassanini and Duval, “Employment Patterns in OECD Countries: Reassessing the Role of Policies and Institutions? OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers n. 35, Paris, 2006, including unemployment rate in the analysis, articulating the analysis upon various age groups (15–24, 20–24) and distinguishing between male and female workers. The tax wedge, changes in union density, the minimum wage, educational attainment and the level of economic activity stand out as the key determinants of youth employability (minimum wage has not however the sign most often expected in the literature). VET programmes participation also matter, although only in the short-run. There are also some interesting differences across age and gender groups. In particular, labour-market institutions seem to have a stronger impact for women.

Using a directional DEA model we analyse the impact of the 2008 financial crisis in a sample of Italian local banks. We rely on a novel data-set, where the banks’ economic environment is measured at a territorially very disaggregated level. The efficiency of cooperative banks deteriorates in the crisis relatively to the other banks, unless we include indicators of territorial diversification and local economic performance in the banks’ production set. This evidence is in line with the bad luck hypothesis, and implies that strict branching regulations had a harmful impact on bank efficiency.

This paper considers a sample of 228 Italian organisations providing communal services with the aim of measuring their technical efficiency using the DEA (Date Envelopment Analysis) method and of testing the existence of efficiency differentials among nonprofit, forprofit and public organisations. The results show that no significant efficiency differentials exist across organisational forms. The innovative aspects of this paper include: 1) the allowance for the role of non-paid labour, that characterises particularly the nonprofit sector; 2) the inclusion among the inputs of indicators of both paid and non-paid work-hours (as opposed to number of workers) and among the outputs of service hours per user; 3) the differentiation, within the nonprofit sector, between social cooperatives, religious nonprofit organisations, and non-religious nonprofit organisations.

This paper employs recently developed non-stationary panel methodologies that assume cross-section dependence to estimate a production function for Italian regions over the 1970–2003 period. The analysis consists of three steps. First, unit root tests for cross-sectionally dependent panels are applied. Second, the existence of a cointegrating relationship among value added, physical capital and human capital-augmented labour is investigated, fully allowing for cross-section dependence. Then, the appropriate Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square estimators developed by Bai and Kao [Bai, J., Kao, C. 2006. On the Estimation and Inference of a Panel Cointegration Model with Cross-Sectional Dependence. In: B.H. Baltagi (Ed) Panel Data Econometrics: Theoretical Contributions and Empirical Applications, Elsevier Science: Amsterdam; 2006, pp.3–30.] are used to estimate the long-run relationship. We find that neglecting cross-section dependence can have a strong impact on the estimated long-run input elasticities, generally imparting them an upward bias.

This paper analyses the extent to which intensive investments in public capital may have had an unfavourable impact on the regional trade balances across the 20 Italian regions. Our working hypothesis is that investments in public capital, while stimulating the demand for tradables across the regions, may have a limited positive impact on the supply of tradables in regions characterised by relatively low productivity like the South of Italy (or Mezzogiorno). The empirical results are consistent with our expectations and suggest that programs of investments in public capital should be accompanied by additional policy measures that can remove the structural factors that hamper the total factor productivity growth in specific areas.

In this chapter, we assess the European Structural Funds’ effects on the economies of the 20 Italian administrative regions for the period 1989–2006. The principal novelties of this chapter are that the empirical analysis separately considers the effects on four sectors (agriculture, energy and manufacturing, construction, and services), and we employ a non-parametric FDH-VP to calculate Malmquist productivity indexes. This allows us to distinguish the Funds’ effects on factor accumulation from those on total productivity changes. Our evidence implies that the Funds had a weak, but significant, impact on total factor productivity change but virtually no effect on capital accumulation or employment. Different types of Structural Funds are found to have widely different influences, with the European Social Fund, arguably, having the strongest impact.

In this paper we test the effect on the technical efficiency of Italian municipalities of Law 81 / 1993, which introduced in Italy a plurality rule for the election of mayors of municipalities with population between 5,000 and 15,000 residents. We estimate technical efficiency both in 1994 (taken as a pre-change year) and 2004 for a sample of 2,336 municipalities, through both FDH and DEA. We then perform on these efficiency scores a difference-in-difference analysis, through fixed effects panel techniques and also with a regression discontinuity design around the size threshold of 15,000 residents. We do not get any evidence that the introduction of a plurality rule in 1993 has resulted in increased efficiency of the concerned municipalities.

Destefanis S. and Sena V. (2005) Public capital and total factor productivity: new evidence from the Italian regions, 1970–98, Regional Studies 39 , 603–618. This paper analyses the relationship between industrial total factor productivity and public capital across the 20 Italian administrative regions. It adds upon the existing literature in a number of ways: it analyses a longer period (1970–98); it allows for the role of human capital accumulation; it tests for the existence of a long‐run relationship between total factor productivity and public capital (through previously suggested panel techniques) and for weak exogeneity of public capital; and it assesses the significance of public capital within a non‐parametric set‐up based on the Free Disposal Hull. The results confirm that public capital has a significant impact on the evolution of total factor productivity, particularly in the Southern regions. This impact is mainly ascribed to the core infrastructures (road and airports, harbours, railroads, w...

1. Entrepreneurship And Post-Entry Performance: The Microeconomic Evidence 2. Gibrat's Law, Firms' Growth (and decline) and the Evolution of Firms' Size Distribution 3. Firm Size Distribution and Returns to Scale. Non-Parametric Frontier Estimates from Italian Manufacturing 4. Innovation, growth and survival of Spanish manufacturing firms 5. Survival of the Fittest: Productivity versus Corruption Effects 6. Innovation and Exports of German Business Services Enterprises: First Evidence from a New Type of Firm Data 7. Young, Small and Export Oriented: the Moroccan Winners? 8. Financial fragility and the distribution of firm growth rates: A Quantile Regressions Approach 9. Determinants of Entry and Exit: Evidence from Tunisian Manufacturing Industries 10. Foreign Direct Investment and Firm Survival in Transition Countries 11. Foreign Ownership, Survival and Growth Dynamics in Turkish Manufacturing 12. Foreign investment and firm selection in Italy: the role of linkages and absorptive capacity 13. Global Activities and Plant Survival - The Case of Sweden 14. Firm Survival and Employment Dynamics during Crises 15. What have We Learned? Lessons for Enterprise Policy

We test the nexus between local financial development and economic growth upon Italian data highly disaggregated at the territorial level, paying particular attention to the role of local banking market structure. We specify a growth model where a qualitative measure of financial development, bank profit efficiency, is considered in conjunction with a customary quantitative measure of financial development. The model is estimated on panel data over the period 2001 to 2010. The evidence suggests that both indicators of financial development have a significant impact on GDP per worker, especially when considering areas characterized by a larger number of cooperative banks. Results are not much affected by the occurrence of the ongoing recession.

The aim of this work is to show how dynamic graphics can supplement, and in some instances even surrogate, techniques of model validation traditionally adopted in economic and business applications. A case study considers a production function estimated over an unbalanced panel of technically efficient countries, where standard validation tools cannot be applied. Yet, the dynamic use of the summary plot and the added variable plot allows even in this case to assess the role of potentially influential observations. Through these procedures, a simple intervention model is implemented, obtaining coefficient values more in line with a priori expectations. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper we test the nexus between financial development and economic growth upon territorially highly disaggregated data from Italy, paying particular attention to the role of market power of local banks and cooperative banks. Profit efficiency, computed using the so-called “true fixed-effects” model proposed by Greene (J PROD ANAL 2005), is used as qualitative measure of financial development, while its quantitative measure is credit volume divided by gross domestic product. A growth model, similar to Hasan et al. (J BANK FINANC 2009), is specified and tested on panel data over the 2001-2010 period. Our estimates suggest that both indicators of financial development have a positive significant impact on GDP per worker, especially when considering cooperative banks and duopolistic markets. None of the above quoted results seems to be much affected by occurrence of the ongoing recession.

How to stimulate growth and support job creation are two critical challenges that countries and localities confront and limited resources require lateral thinking about how actions in one area, such as employment and training, can have simultaneous benefits in others, such as creating new jobs and better supporting labour market inclusion. To achieve a more co-ordinated and joined up approach, local stakeholders need to pool resources and reduce transaction costs by building effective partnerships on the ground. The OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) programme has developed the international Local Job Creation project to assess the contribution of labour market policy to boosting quality employment and enhancing productivity by better matching skills supply to demand, improving training provision and addressing skills gaps, as well as improving skills utilisation by firms. This working paper, reports on the review carried out for the Labour Agency (Agenzia del Lavoro) of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy, and highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of policy approaches and actions taken by the Labour Agency. The working paper concludes with an outline of the key issues for consideration for the Labour Agency that could inform the development of an action plan in order to ensure the right conditions exist for sustainable job creation at the local level.

To be successful in today’s knowledge economy, communities need to boost not only the skills of local people but also the utilisation and deployment of these skills by employers. By ensuring that skills are utilised effectively, local economies can become more competitive and host better quality and better paid jobs, while simultaneously improving living standards and stimulating innovation. The OECD LEED Skills for Competitiveness project has reviewed the tools and governance mechanisms which policy makers are putting in place to tackle this policy area in three LEED member countries, Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy, with information on a wider set of policies and measurement tools being collected through an international literature review. This country report for Italy sets out data findings on the supply and demand for skills at sub-regional level (OECD territorial level 3) before exploring policy responses in Campania and Veneto, and local case studies from the Riviera del Brenta industrial district and Treviso in Veneto. The report concludes with potential policy levers for further driving sectoral and local skills development in the future.

We assess the employment impact of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run growth in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. The Strategy had some impact, especially for old-age workers, but no improvement ensued from its mid-term reassessment.

In this paper we analyse the determination of cost efficiency in a sample of Italian small banks located in different geographical areas and including two great institutional categories: cooperative banks (CB’s) and other banks. We highlight the effect of environmental factors (asset quality, local GDP per capita) on banks’ performance, and provide novel evidence in favour of the “bad luck” hypothesis suggested by Berger and De Young (Journal of Banking and Finance, 1997). Local GDP per capita strongly affects the territorial differentials for technical efficiency, especially for CB’s. This can be easily rationalised, as current regulations hamper CB’s vis-à-vis other banks in their capability to diversify territorially. Our estimates provide us with a tentative quantitative measure of the costs of missing diversification, ranging between 2 and 7 percentage points. Correspondingly, our evidence suggests that there is potentially strong endogeneity in some currently available bank performance indicators.

In this paper we put to test the impact of the European Structural Funds on the economies of the 20 Italian administrative regions for the 1989-2006 period. The main elements of novelty are that the empirical analysis is carried out by considering separately four sectors (agriculture, energy and manufacturing, construction, services), and that a non-parametric FDH-VP approach is used in order to calculate some Malmquist index numbers of productivity. This allows separating the Funds’ effects on factor accumulation from those on total productivity changes. Our evidence implies that the Funds had a weak, but significant, impact on capital accumulation, total factor productivity change and employment. This impact is strongest in agriculture and services, and weakest in energy and manufacturing.

We assess the impact on employment growth of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run trends in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. We find that the Strategy had some favourable (but weak) impact, especially for old-age workers. However, no improvement ensued from its mid-term reassessment.

Using data from the Bank of Italy’s Household Survey we find that a wage curve exists in Italy after the 1992-93 wage reforms for annual and monthly wages but not for hourly wages. Consistently, after the reforms we find a negative elasticity of annual hours and months worked with respect to the unemployment rate.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the evolution of labour‐market performance in the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) over the last decade, considering the robustness of the claims made in an important OECD follow‐up study.Design/methodology/approachThe paper sets up an empirical framework calibrated on an important OECD follow‐up study, and suggests some ways in which the impact of unobserved heterogeneity and outliers on policy estimates can be treated in a cross‐section framework. The framework applies to the data for 30 OECD countries.FindingsThe paper finds that changes in labour‐market performance are inversely linked to lagged unemployment. Changes in the share of construction workers are also significant even in the presence of various kinds of policy change indicators. As far as the latter are concerned, the results highlight the role of unemployment benefits and, especially, active labour‐market policies.Research limitations/implicationsThe kind of policy change indicators used do not allow the adoption of panel data techniques.Practical implicationsAn important policy role seems to emerge for unemployment benefit reforms and, even more so, active labour‐market policies. The evidence also supports the contention that the construction sector is important for labour‐market performance.Originality/valueThe paper brings to the fore novel evidence about cross‐country labour‐market performance at a time when this issue is of high interest for citizens and policy‐makers.

This paper explores the relationship between firm size distribution and technology. We analyse firm technology across selected manufacturing industries by means of a non-parametric production analysis, the Free Disposal Hull approach (Deprins et al., 1984; Kerstens and Vanden Eeckaut, 1999) and appraise the links between size and scale elasticity, finding a clear inverse relationship. Building on this result, we inquire whether the shape of the firm size distribution is related to a particular pattern of scale elasticities. We rely on the Zipf Plot (Stanley et al., 1995) of the Pareto IV distribution, which is concave up to a given threshold, and then approximately linear. Firms in the concave part of the plot are overwhelmingly found to experience increasing returns to scale. On the contrary, firms in the linear part are mainly characterised by constant returns to scale.

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 conclude that institutions are a key part of the story, the survey's results appear far less robust and uniform than is commonly believed. We then assess the robustness of the claims made in the most recent (2005) OECD followup study within a very similar cross-country setup, and highlight the impact of unobserved heterogeneity and outliers on the policy estimates. We find that in recent OECD cross-country data, changes in labor-market performance are consistently (and inversely) linked to its lagged level. Structural changes are also important: changes in the share of construction employees are very significant, even in the presence of various kinds of policy change indicators. As far as the latter are concerned, some consistent role seems to emerge only for active labor-market policies and (to a lesser extent) unemployment benefit reforms.

This paper analyzes the relatively novel concept of a downward-sloping demand for volunteer labour, using data from the Italian social services sector. Both descriptive and econometric evidence shows that the price of volunteer labour (proxied by its shadow price obtained through DEA) is negatively related to the number of volunteer hours. Furthermore, the demand for volunteer labour is higher in areas relatively well endowed with social capital, where there is also evidence that organizations refrain from substituting volunteers for paid workers when the latter become more expensive. According to our results, the productivity of voluntary labour is higher in social capital-rich regions, where more motivated and skilful volunteers are drawn from a relatively larger pool.

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 for the simultaneous determination of inequality and employment and treats the potential trade-off between inequality and employment in a very flexible way. We attribute the variations in the rates of unemployment and non-employment to two components: the changes due to a variation in wage inequality along the inequality-employment trade-off and the changes in efficiency which simultaneously affect inequality and employment). We find that changes in efficiency are a fairly important component of total changes.

In this paper, controlling for several macroeconomic factors, we test the hypothesis that central bank independence is closely correlated with the level of social consensus and cooperation on income distribution. Using data from a panel of OECD countries over period 1972-2002, we find evidence in favour of this hypothesis. When one allows for the degree of social consensus and cooperation on income distribution, as in Tarantelli’s (1986) index of corporatism, the relationship between inflation and CBI weakens in the presence of indicators of corporatism. Interestingly, this relationship does not weaken if allowance is made for indicators of corporatism placing much greater weight on the centralisation of unions or of wage bargaining than on the degree of consensus.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the corporate governance system and technical efficiency in Italian manufacturing. We use a non-parametric frontier technique (DEA) to derive technical efficiency measures for a sample of Italian firms taken from nine manufacturing industries. These measures are then related to the characteristics of the corporate governance system. Two of these characteristics turn out to have a positive impact on technical efficiency: the percentage of the company shares owned by the largest shareholder and the fact that a firm belongs to a pyramidal group. Interestingly, a trade-off emerges between these influences, in the sense that one is stronger in industries where the other is weaker. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We analyse the relationship between socio-economic variables and health outcomes for adult participants in three waves of the British Household Panel Survey from 1999 to 2001. We adopt Sen’s capability approach and compute a capability index ranking individuals on the basis of their ability to transform health and economic resources into health functionings. The results show that, even when controlling for access to health resources, socio-economic variables affect significantly the health functionings in the UK. This suggests the need for more equalitarian access policies to health care facilities.

This chapter has used a matching theory approach to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the so-called 1997 Treu Act (legge Treu). Although the Treu Act aroused considerable interest in the press and among labour market participants, to date extensive scientific analysis on its effects has not been conducted. Our study is also of some interest because the relationship between unemployment and vacancies has been very seldom analysed in the Italian literature, mainly because of the lack of official vacancy data. We have adopted a fairly recent empirical approach where the matching function, re-parameterised as a Beveridge Curve, is modelled and estimated as a production frontier.

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 carried out in non-parametric matching analysis. The selection bias can be treated by conditioning these comparisons on the variables ruling the distribution of state aid. We separately utilise four Capitalia surveys, in order to test whether policy effectiveness has changed during the 1990s. Moreover we consider separately the effects of the three main kinds of state aid to manufacturing (soft loans, grants, and tax rebates). The results indicate that state aid had a negative impact on technical efficiency. However, this impact mostly relates to soft loans, and looses significance in the late 1990s.

A matching theory approach is used to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 Treu Act (legge Treu), which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. We re-parameterize the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a production frontier, finding huge differences in matching efficiency between the South and the rest of the country. The Treu Act appears to have improved matching efficiency in the North of the country, particularly for skilled workers, but also to have strengthened competition among skilled and unskilled workers, especially in the South.

There is a plethora of studies of regional production functions using stationary panel data. Only some recent works consider non-stationary panel data. All of them assume the hypothesis of cross-section independence. Here, we claim that the independence assumption is too strong when regional data are used. In this paper, the cross-section independence assumption is released and cross-sectional dependence is assumed. First, unit roots and cointegration properties of the panel dataset are properly investigated by using newly developed tests for cross-sectionally dependent panels. Second, dynamic OLS (DOLS) and recent regression models for cross-sectionally correlated panels are used to estimate the cointegrated relationship between value added, physical and human capital, for Italian regions over the period 1970-1998.

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 parametric and also allows to ascertain the presence of outliers in the observed production set.

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, Construction, Trade, Transport and Communication, Finance and Insurance, Others). Some salient features of the data suggest that they provide useful insights in the relationships between human capital and growth in Italy.