Funding entiy: Italian Ministry of University and Research

Call: PRIN 2017

Coordinator: UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI PISA

UNISI Principal Investigator: Michelangelo Vasta

Department: Economics and statistics

Start date: 29 April 2020 – End date: 29 April 2024

Description

The purpose of this project is to test a number of broad historical conjectures about the long term shortcomings of the Italian development path by collecting as much quantitative evidence as possible, given the available sources, from the end of Napoleonic wars to the current days.

Creating a long run dataset

As a first step, we will build a data-base on long run trends in real wages, human capital formation, technology indicators, trade and productivity in Italy, collecting systematically all the available series and supplementing them with new research, with a special effort to cover the period before the Unification, which is still hardly covered in the current literature.

Reassessing the characteristics of the Italian development process

We plan a number of empirical studies that will provide a systematic reassessment of the Italian development process. In particular we shall focus on:

Sources of productivity;
Patterns of inventive activities;
Patterns of trade;
Human capital formation;
Wage formation

Development of history oriented agent based models (HOABM)

As a second step, we shall use this new dataset to reassess the characteristics of the Italian economic growth process in the long run, distilling a number of stylized facts. We will interpret them using econometric statistical tools and we will validate our insights by means of Historically Oriented Agent-Based Models (HOABM).

These models will replicate the major stylized facts of Italian economic development and allow the systematic testing of counterfactual scenarios on major historical junctures or key-policy decision version of the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S) agent-based model (Dosi, Fagiolo and Roventini 2010).

Workshops and Summer Schools

LH will organize a series of Summer Schools open to PhD students from Italy and abroad on sources and methods for the study of long run economic development using the Italian experience as a case-study.

 

Source: Project website