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 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.

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. Copyright 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation 2007 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

This paper analyses the relationship between industrial total factor productivity and public capital across the 20 Italian administrative regions. We add upon the existing literature in a number of ways: we analyse a longer period (1970-98); we allow for the role of human capital accumulation; we test for the existence of a long-run relationship between total factor productivity and public capital (through the panel techniques suggested in Im et al., 2001;Pedroni, 1997Pedroni, , 1999 and for weak exogeneity of public capital (Urbain, 1992); we assess 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 to be mainly ascribed to the core infrastructures (road and airports, harbours, railroads, water and electricity, telecommunications). Also, core infrastructures are found to be weakly exogenous.

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The dataset built for this empirical exercise contains data on the cohesion policies implemented in the Italian regions, regional economic variables and political and institutional variables. We utilize annual regional data available from 1994 up to 2013. Regional data for real GDP, value added, gross fixed investment, and employment and labour units are taken from ISTAT's regional accounting (ISTAT being the Italian Statistical Office).European structural and national funds were both taken from the database Spesa statale regionalizzata of the General Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, which allows us to rely for both kinds of funds on series based on the same methodology. Funds' series relate to the amounts actually disbursed by the various regions. A proportion of funds (both national and from EU) are not allocated to any single region, but to multi-regional aggregates. In our analysis, we shall assume that these funds are spread across regions proportionally to the shares of regionally allocated funds. This is the hypothesis most often maintained in the literature (see Aiello and Pupo, 2009) and that most makes sense from an a priori standpoint. We provide below a closeup of this database.Regional data on GDP, gross fixed capital formation, population and employment (labour units), and sectoral shares of employment and value added are taken from ISTAT Regional Accounting.Measures of the regional rate of unemployment are obtained from the ISTAT Labour Force Survey.As regards politically based indicators, we extracted data about regional governments for the 1990-2013 period from the Anagrafe degli amministratori locali e regionali database of the Italian

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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