Quantifying productivity is a conditio sine qua non for empirical analysis in a number of research fields. The identification of the measure that best fits with the specific goals, as well as being data driven, is currently complicated by the fact that an array of methodologies is available. This paper provides economic researchers with an up-to-date overview of issues and relevant solutions associated with this choice. Methods of productivity measurement are surveyed and classified according to three main criteria: (i) macro/micro; (ii) frontier/non-frontier and (iii) deterministic/econometric

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital in a convergence regression for t he panel of Italian regions. We include measures of average, primary, secondary and tertiary education. We find that increased education seems to contribute to growth only in the South. Decomposing total schooling into its three constituent parts, we find that only primary education in the South seems to be important. The results thus suggest that the Italian growth benefited from the elimination of illiteracy in the South, mainly in the 1960s, but not from the substantial increases in education at the other levels. JEL Classification Number: I21

We study the effects of managerial practices in schools on student outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries. We find substantial heterogeneity in managerial practices across six industrialized countries, with more centralized systems (Italy and Germany) lagging behind the more autonomous ones (Canada, Sweden, the UK, the US). For Italy, we are able to match organizational practices at the school level with student outcomes in a math standardized test. We find that managerial practices are positively related to student outcomes. The estimates imply that if Italy had the same managerial practices as the UK (the best performer), it would close the gap in the math OECD-PISA test with respect to the OECD average. We argue that our results are robust to selection issues and show that they are confirmed by a set of IV estimates and by a large number of robustness checks. Overall, our results suggest that policies directed at improving student cognitive achievements should take into account principals selection and training in terms of managerial capabilities.

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology based on Islam (2000) to assess the existence of technology convergence across the Italian regions between 1963 and 1993. Our results find strong support to both the presence of TFP heterogeneity across Italian regions and to the hypothesis that TFP convergence has been a key factor in the process of aggregate regional convergence observed in Italy up to the mid-seventies. However, this period of TFP convergence has not generated a significant, persistent decrease in the degree of cross-region inequality in per capita income. Finally, our human capital measures has been found to be highly positively correlated with TFP levels. This evidence confirms one of the hypothesis of the Nelson and Phelps approach, namely that human capital is the main determinant of technological catch-up. Our results are robust to the use of different estimation procedure such as simple LSDV, Kiviet-corrected LSDV, and GMM à la Arellano and Bond (1991). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that evidence on TFP convergence across Italian regions has been produced in a context in which the traditional Solovian-type of convergence is simultaneously taken into account.We gratefully acknowledge financial support from MIUR Cofin "I fattori che influenzano i processi di crescita economica e di convergenza tra le regioni europee". We would like to thank