Human capital and growth in the European Regions. Does allocation matter?

The paper examines the relationship between the allocation of human capital among different activities and economic growth in the context of the European regions. A proxy of the allocation of the labor force to technical activities is constructed using data about occupations at the regional level and included in cross section growth regressions together with various educational variables (primary, secondary and higher education years and shares). The main results of the paper are the following: the educational variables become insignificant when country dummies are included in the regressions suggesting that, due to differences in the national education systems, they capture the effects of some omitted country specific variable; on the other hand a robust correlation emerges between the allocational variable and the regional rate of growth in the period 1981-91

European regional growth: do sectors matter?

The recent theoretical and empirical works on economic growth based on Solow’s model have generally neglected the role played by the sectoral mix and structural change on aggregate growth. However, as many development economists have remarked, sectors are characterized by enormous differences in terms of technological change, intersectoral linkages and the degree of scale economies. In this paper we show that indeed sectors matter in determining aggregate growth across European regions. More specifically, we show that large part of convergence is induced by a structural change process of shifting employment from low to high productive sectors that is relatively faster in the initially less productive southern European regions

The expectations hypothesis of the term structure: evidence for Germany

In this paper we examine the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHT) using a newly constructed monthly database of zero coupon bond yields from the German Government bond market. We use data at the short end of the maturity spectrum (maturities less than two years) and employ two approaches to predict future movements in shorter-term interest rates: one based on the yield spread, the other based on the forward-spot rate spread. We find that for the period considered, 1985:2-1994:12, both spreads contain substantial information for predicting future interest rate movements. Moreover, the results are, in general, consistent with the implications of the EHT, as far as the value of the coefficient of the spread is concerned. This means that in Germany the spread can be used as an important indicator for the conduct of monetary policy

Un'analisi econometrica sul contenuto informativo della struttura a termine dei tassi di interesse tedeschi

In this paper the usefulness of spreads between long and short interest rates as indicators of future interest rates is analysed using monthly data derived from the estimation of the German term structure over the period 1983(11)-1994(12). The analysis is conducted using modern techniques of time series, as the cointegration analysis and the estimation of vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The results show that interest rate spreads contain considerable information about future short rate changes. This implies that interest rate spreads may be used as useful indicators for the future conduct of monetary policy

Technological enclaves and industrial districts. An analysis of the regional distribution of innovative activity in Europe

This paper explores the spatial distribution of innovative and productive activity across 109 regions of the European Union, thanks to an original databank on regional patents statistics. The main results worth highlighting are as follows. The technological activity in the EU appears to be highly concentrated, although concentration tends to decline over the eighties. This results from the huge differences between southern and northern Europe. As expected, there is a positive association between the regional distribution of innovative activity and labour productivity. Further, contrary to previous evidence on the United States, our data show a significant link between the specialisation in innovation and in production both at the country and at the industry level. This suggests that localised knowledge spillovers and agglomeration economies foster a local economic system towards a specialisation in both production and technology. More surprisingly there appears a negative correlation between technological concentration and aggregate productivity, that is the European regions which enjoy a more homogeneous distribution of their technological capability across different industrial sectors appear to be also characterised by a higher productivity level. This outcome may suggest the presence of positive inter-industry externalities that favour those regions which succeed in covering a broader range of technological activities

Modelli di determinazione del tasso di cambio: un'analisi di cointegrazione

The aim of this paper is to examine the empirical relation between exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals for five major industrialised countries in the floating exchange rates period after 1973. Two theoretical models of exchange rate determination are considered: a monetary model in Frankel's real interest differential version (1979), and a synthesis of monetary and portfolio balance approaches proposed by Ashok Parikh (1992). The empirical analysis on these models has been run through the application of cointegration techniques, both in a univariate framework à la Engle and Granger and through the multivariate Johansen's procedure. After the cointegration analysis, the long run estimates have been put in a structural ECM in order to model simultaneously long and short run dynamics. The results for the monetary model in the long run are very interesting for France, Japan and Spain, while for Germany and UK the model cannot capture the actual pattern of the exchange rate; in the short run the difficulty in modelling exchange rate changes has been confirmed. The synthesis model between the two approaches estimated for Germany, Japan and UK appears to be completely unsatisfactory