TY - JOUR
T1 - The race between the snail and the tortoise
T2 - skill premium and early industrialization in Italy (1861–1913)
AU - Federico, Giovanni
AU - Nuvolari, Alessandro
AU - Ridolfi, Leonardo
AU - Vasta, Michelangelo
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Maria Angeles Pons and Mauro Rota for sharing their data with us and Gabriele Cappelli, Giulia Mancini, Luca Mocarelli, and Tiziano Razzolini for very useful comments and suggestions. We thank Alberto Montesi and Sara Pecchioli for excellent research assistance. The paper has benefited from the comments of all participants at the 8th edition of EH/tune Economic History Workshop (Siena, 2018), the FRESH meeting (Groningen, 2018), the Economic History Society Annual Conference (Belfast, 2019), the BETA Workshop (Strasbourg, 2019), the 16th Annual STOREP Conference (Siena, 2019), the European Historical Economics Society Conference (Paris, 2019), and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne’s International economics and labor markets seminar (Paris, 2019).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2021/1
Y1 - 2021/1
N2 - In this paper, we estimate series of the skill premium for Italy during the early stages of the industrialization with a refined version of the regression approach originally introduced by Clark (J Polit Econ 113(6):1307–1340, 2005). We compute series for the whole country as well as separate series for macro-regions and for construction and manufacturing, and, within manufacturing, we estimate high and low skill premia for blue collars. We interpret the results with an extended version of the classic Katz and Autor (in: Ashenfelter, Card (eds) Handbook of labor economics, Elsevier, Dordrecht, pp 1463–1555, 1999) framework. The overall premium remained stable until the 1890s and then declined for the joint effect of migrations (almost exclusively of unskilled workers) and the rise in literacy, which was not compensated by the modest increase in industrial employment.
AB - In this paper, we estimate series of the skill premium for Italy during the early stages of the industrialization with a refined version of the regression approach originally introduced by Clark (J Polit Econ 113(6):1307–1340, 2005). We compute series for the whole country as well as separate series for macro-regions and for construction and manufacturing, and, within manufacturing, we estimate high and low skill premia for blue collars. We interpret the results with an extended version of the classic Katz and Autor (in: Ashenfelter, Card (eds) Handbook of labor economics, Elsevier, Dordrecht, pp 1463–1555, 1999) framework. The overall premium remained stable until the 1890s and then declined for the joint effect of migrations (almost exclusively of unskilled workers) and the rise in literacy, which was not compensated by the modest increase in industrial employment.
KW - Human capital
KW - Inequality
KW - Labour markets
KW - Skill premium
KW - Technological progress
KW - Wages
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U2 - 10.1007/s11698-019-00200-2
DO - 10.1007/s11698-019-00200-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85077159175
VL - 15
SP - 1
EP - 42
JO - Cliometrica
JF - Cliometrica
SN - 1863-2505
IS - 1
ER -