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 investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

Our study analyses the costs and benefits of early child care for mothers’ labour supply and child development in Italy, exploring the role of the selection criteria used by local governments to assign child care slots. In Italy, only around 13% of the demand for public child care...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of child?s own in- vestments. Information on how children invest their time separately from parents is probably little informative for babies and...

In this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the cognitive development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child cognitive outcomes in target populations. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the cost...