Francesca Ghinami (p)

Eduardo Sisti

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth is deemed to depend, almost equally, on technological adoption and on the efficiency with which production factors are allocated across heterogeneous firms. However, while the former has received extensive attention from the regional and spatial economics’ fields, regional perspectives on the latter are still scant notwithstanding reasons, both theoretical (spatial frictions, market segmentation, and agglomeration economies) and evidence-based to expect location to affect the efficiency of factors allocation across firms.

The present article deals with factors misallocation at national and subnational level, with a comparative framework among two countries, Italy and Spain, sharing similar economics features (e.g. in terms of geographical concentration of production, economic disparities among regions, share of familiar-owned firms, low institutional quality, account imbalances and output gap).
As such, it is expected to offer insights on the role of different misallocation markers, verifying and extending country-specific previous findings on the role of specific firms and local characteristics such as ownership type, innovativeness, and agglomeration economies.

By performing the analysis at different levels of geographical aggregation, it will provide insights on the within-country imbalances in resource allocative efficiency, assessing how much of the two countries' aggregates are explained at local level, which areas are the ones deserving more attention, and which productive characteristics are linked with misallocation in agglomerated or peripheral areas.
Finally, on account of the time-span up to the end of 2020, the research will offer some preliminary results of the impact of Covid-19 on the misallocation trends in the two Southern European countries.

Stefano Magrini (p), Alessandro Spiganti

Francesca Ghinami

We present a two-area endogenous growth model where abstract knowledge flows at no cost across space but tacit knowledge arises from the interaction among researchers and is hampered by distance. Digital communication reduces this “cost of distance” and reinforces productive specialization, leading to an increase in the system-wide growth rate but at the cost of more inequality within and across areas. These results are consistent with evidences on the rise in the concentration of innovative activities, income inequality, and skills and income divergence across US urban areas.

Eduardo Sisti (p)

Stefano Magrini

The relevance of the study of productivity and wellbeing is of topical importance. On the one hand, the productivity slowdown has been persistent among developed countries since 2005 and the financial crisis (OECD, 2015; Adler; Duval, Furceri, Koloskova & Poplawski-Ribeiro, 2017; Sprague, 2021). On the other hand, the focus on wellbeing is a clear mandate for regions, whose objectives are beyond the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), creating good conditions and well-being for its citizens. The rising inequality on the well-being part and the productivity slowdown have significant place-based implications (Tsvetkova et al. 2020; Evenhuis, Lee, Martin & Tyler, 2021). In addition, the importance of institutions, norms and culture to influence economic and social outcomes is well documented (Pinto et al. 2019; Boschma, 2015).
Our contribution is directed to include the critical role of the institutional framework and specially, of the quality of the institutions, to affect productivity-well-being debate. We pondered the question of which are the links (or the trade-off) between well-being and productivity and if this relationship is mediated or affected by differences in the regional institutional frames and its quality.
Our objective is to explore the interaction between well-being and productivity among the European NUTS 2 regions, and the institutional frames that underlie such relationship.