In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle...

In Italy two censuses were taken in 1911: the usual demographic census, that contains labor-force data, and the first industrial census, that contains employment data. The two yield aggregate figures that are very far apart. The literature directly concerned with estimating industrial employment...

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector...

The reconstruction of the historical national accounts for post-Unification Italy is proceeding. The national time series most recently compiled are those for the all-important engineering industry; this paper presents their regional counterparts. The engineering industry is very unevenly...

In the literature the (Italian) engineering industry is seen as one that transformed metal into machines; its time path is inferred from that of its consumption of metal. Newly recovered evidence indicates that far more metal was turned into (traditional) hardware than into (modern) machines....

This paper exploits a national university reform, introduced in Italy with an exogenous timing and an unintended delay of treatment scheme, to identify the impact on higher education participation of shortening the degree duration of the first-tier university studies. Using a degree-specific...

Theoretical considerations suggest that workers holding temporary contracts should accumulate more general human capital than workers under permanent contracts. Using matched employer-employee data, we find empirical support for this hypothesis, by showing that dismissed temporary workers are...

The goal of this paper (in Italian) is to assess the impact of consumers’ incentives to building renovations – introduced in Italy in 1997 by means of tax reimbursements – on construction sector’s economic activity. Our analysis – which absent any sectional variability in the policy...

This paper aims to analyze phenomena such as the diffusion of non-standard work and the incidence of low-paid work from a distinctive, and generally neglected angle: that of occupations. Much can be gained from a more fine-grained analysis of labour market dynamics that casts light on which...

The "Gerschenkron effect" refers to the purported biases of early-weighted and late-weighted indices of production. If production is properly measured in what economists mean by "real" terms, the "Gerschenkron effect" does not exist at all.