Antonio Accetturo

Banca d'Italia · Research Dpt

Over the past decade, the differences in economic development at the regional level have widened even further: Southern regions of Italy have consistently seen a decrease in their economic weight, highlighting a growing difficulty in employing the available workforce, a reduction in capital accumulation, and slower population growth compared to mor...

This short essay looks at the interactions between history and economic development mediated by regional policy. We focus on Italy and present case studies based on the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a major intervention aimed at developing Italy’s South that was implemented over the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that historically-drive...

Questo rapporto riassume i risultati di un progetto di ricerca svolto dalla Banca d’Italia nel corso dell’ultimo biennio. Il rapporto fornisce un quadro aggiornato dei divari territoriali in Italia con riferimento al sistema produttivo, al mercato del lavoro, al finanziamento delle imprese e ai fattori di contesto e svolge alcune considerazioni sul...

Questo rapporto riassume i risultati di un progetto di ricerca svolto dalla Banca d’Italia nel corso dell’ultimo biennio. Il rapporto fornisce un quadro aggiornato dei divari territoriali in Italia con riferimento al sistema produttivo, al mercato del lavoro, al finanziamento delle imprese e ai fattori di contesto e svolge alcune considerazioni sul...

We provide a counterfactual evaluation of a policy implemented by two Italian regional governments (the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano) to subsidize the entry of new and technologically advanced companies. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that the subsidies were effective in stimulating the entry of new firms. The policy...

Investment is playing a critical role as the world scrambles to shift to a low-carbon economy. But little is known about how credit constraints influence firm-level decisions to invest in green technologies. This column uses a nationwide register of approximately 30,000 Italian firms to shed light on this question. The results show that overall cre...

The fall of employment in manufacturing that the world's most advanced economies have been experiencing in the past 40 years has triggered a number of policies, undertaken in several countries. In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of a place‐based policy, carried out in Italy, aimed at both generating private investments and increasing emplo...

We analyze the historical origins and subsequent development of the Italian urban system. We show that geography, history, and their interaction crucially explain the distribution of population over space and its evolution over time: Italy was already highly urbanized during the Roman Empire; in the middle ages and in the modern era, the size and l...

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the results of a recent research project by the Bank of Italy. The paper analyses the interplay between historical origins, congestion costs, and agglomeration benefits in shaping the Italian urban system. It shows that urban agglomeration externalities (on wages, productivity, or innovation) tend...

This paper analyzes the impact of cultural proximity on economic exchanges and, in particular, on tourist flows. It exploits the cultural heterogeneity in South Tyrol, an Italian region bordering on Austria and Switzerland where two main linguistic groups (Italian and German) coexist. It is shown that the share of tourism by German-speaking countri...

This paper presents some evidence on the dynamics of population across Italian locations (municipalities and LLMs) over the period 1951–2011. We find that population shifted from initially smaller to relatively larger locations. The growth rate of very large urban areas was particularly intense in the post-war period, while it became slower in the...

In this paper, we propose a novel—and general‐purpose—modeling approach. We give a linear representation of the spatial general equilibrium, expressed in terms of local percentage deviations from the benchmark case of symmetry, where all the areas in the economy are taken to be initially identical. To illustrate the flexibility of our approach, we...

Two main hypotheses are usually put forward to explain the productivity advantages of larger cities: agglomeration economies and firm selection. Combes et al. (2012) propose an empirical approach to disentangle these two effects and find no impact of selection on local productivity differences. We theoretically show that selection effects do emerge...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) were one of the main transmission mechanisms of the 2009 great trade collapse. Our paper describes the effects of the crisis from a country-comparative perspective (Germany and Italy) and at firm level. There are two main conclusions: i) supplier firms were hit by the crisis more than final firms; ii) firms' position in G...

Does tougher law enforcement positively affect political participation? This paper addresses this question, which hinges upon the causal impact of formal institutions on informal ones, by using a historical event from 19th century Italy. This event was the Pica Law, which was introduced in 1863 to fight a surge of criminal violence in Southern Ital...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) have been one of the main transmission mechanisms of 2009 the Great Trade Collapse. Our paper provides a description of the effects of the crisis from a perspective that is both country-comparative (Germany and Italy) and on firm level. Two are the main conclusions: i) intermediate firms were hit by the crisis more than f...

Il lavoro analizza l’evoluzione recente delle economie del Nord Ovest italiano, concentrandosi sui fenomeni della deindustrializzazione e della terziarizzazione dell’economia. Dal confronto con un gruppo di regioni europee definibili come “industriali avanzate”, emerge come il ritardo di crescita economica del Nord Ovest, accentuatosi nel corso deg...

Il lavoro analizza l’evoluzione recente delle economie del Nord Ovest italiano, concentrandosi sui fenomeni della deindustrializzazione e della terziarizzazione dell’economia. Dal confronto con un gruppo di regioni europee definibili come “industriali avanzate”, emerge come il ritardo di crescita economica del Nord Ovest, accentuatosi nel corso deg...

Transfers can do good; however, they can also result in massive failures. This paper presents a model that highlights the ambiguous nature of the impact of transfers on local endowments of social capital. It then describes an empirical investigation that illustrates that the receipt of EU structural funds causes a deterioration of the endowments of...

This paper analyzes the effects of international trade on the relative demand for skilled workers in Italian local labor markets. We find that exports cause a sizable skill upgrading in the labor force by increasing the average level of education of the workforce and the share of white-collars workers.

This paper considers the “share-altering” technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where individuals have different levels of skills. Building on a simple Cobb-Douglas production function, our model shows that the implementation of skill-biased technologies requires a sufficient proportion of highly educated individuals. M...

Il lavoro documenta la recente evoluzione del sistema industriale italiano e discute i principali fattori che influiscono sulla sua competitività. Dall’analisi emerge un quadro di diffusa debolezza. In tutti i comparti industriali i livelli produttivi sono inferiori a quelli precedenti la crisi; con l’eccezione dei comparti alimentare e farmaceutic...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialised countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by immigrants) or to an involuntary process (i.e. low labor market evaluation of their skills). This...

In Italy, Patti Territoriali (Territorial Pacts) are one of the main government-sponsored programmes to foster growth in disadvantaged areas. A territorial pact is an agreement among the local authorities and representatives of civil society (mainly entrepreneurs and trade unions) of a number of neighbouring municipalities that is subsequently endo...

The paper consider the skill-biased “share-altering†technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where skilled and unskilled individual may exhibit different preferences for local amenities. A main novelty –both for labour and urban economics- is that, under this hypothesis, skill-biased technical change can...

We present a model of industrial location and endogenous growth with congestion costs. According to the interplay between knowledge spillovers and commuting costs, we are able to obtain both a Krugman‐type and a bell‐shaped agglomeration outcome. In the first case, the economy experiences a permanent income inequality in the steady state and income...

The paper introduces mobility costs and non-competitive wage setting into the spatial equilibrium model to analyse regional differences in rents, wages, unemployment and populations. It also considers the impact of policies, such as transfer payments to households and subsidies to firms, and illustrates a numerical exercise to discuss their welfare...

The aim of this paper is to assess the relation between individual skills and labour market performance by immigrants residing in Lombardy. We exploit a rich dataset collected by the NGO ISMU, which includes information on individual characteristics and the legal status of each immigrant. Our results show that returns on schooling are positive, alt...

Introdotti nel 1996, i Patti Territoriali (PT) hanno rappresentato il principale strumento di programmazione negoziata in Italia. Un PT è un accordo tra rappresentanti delle amministrazioni locali, imprenditori e sindacati dei lavoratori per la realizzazione di progetti imprenditoriali e interventi pubblici (infrastrutture e incentivi). Ad un PT po...

This paper investigates the impact of immigrant employment on investment in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We find that on average a larger share of immigrants, computed both at provincial- and firm- level, does not reduce firms' investment rate in machinery, while it has a negative effect on the acquisition of new software and databases....

Firms exposed to foreign demand have larger incentives to inno-vate, if market size matters for innovation. We test this hypothesis using Italian firm data. We measure innovation as the probability of applying for a patent to the European Patent Office, whereas most of the existing papers focus either on productivity or other self-reported measure...

Si presentano un saggio empirico e due modelli teorici originali sul rapporto tra geografia economica e crescita. Nel saggio empirico si presentano alcuni fatti stilizzati sull'evoluzione della concentrazione spaziale delle attività innovative in Italia nel periodo 1971-2001. Si mostra, con metodologie non-parametriche su base markoviana, come la c...