Perchè cosi pochi laureati nell'industria manifatturiera italiana?

Tertiary education attainment of italian labour force, particularly in the manufacturing industry, shows empirically a large gap with respect to the other OECD countries, although human capital growth has been increasingly addressed as one of the main channel towards productivity, competitive success and firm size growth. The paper analyses empirically four different explicative hypotheses, each with its own set of proxies: firm size, sectoral differences in human capital intensity, education supply of the labour force, and firm-specific demand issues. Estimates show that while structural explanations based on firm size and sectoral differences play a key causal role in determining the observed low level of human capital, supply conditions seem to have a lower esplicative power, both directly through local supply of educated workers and indirectly through their weight on the labour cost. Firm-specific demand variables, particularly those proxying for the complexity and richness of organizational structure and management, show instead the highest explicative power. More particularly, family-managed firms seem to perform a sort of “subjective resistance” to a more intensive employment of highly educated labour force.