Local Human Capital Externalities and Wages at Firm Level

We use a unique data set providing administrative information on earnings by skill-level (blue collars, white collars), on the local stock of human capital and on several firm’s characteristics, including balance sheet data, to investigate the size of localized human capital externalities in Italian manufacturing. Our estimates do not show any evidence of human capital spillovers neither at the firm nor at the local level. This finding is not really surprising and can be explained by many features of Italian manufacturing.externalities, human capital, manufacturing, wages.