Measuring Productivity Dispersion: Lessons From Counting One-Hundred Million Ballots

Ethan Ilzetzki and Saverio Simonelli

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: We measure output per worker in nearly 8,000 municipalities in the Italian electoral process using ballot counting times in the 2013 general election and two referenda in 2016. We document large productivity dispersion across provinces in this very uniform and low-skill task that involves nearly no technology and requires limited physical capital. Using a development accounting framework, this measure explains up to half of the firm-level productivity dispersion across Italian provinces and more than half the north-south productivity gap in Italy. We explore potential drivers of our measure of labor efficiency and we find that its association with measures of work ethic and trust are particularly robust.

Keywords: Labor productivity; development accounting; work ethic; cultural economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J24 O47 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp483.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring Productivity Dispersion: Lessons from counting one-hundred million ballots (2017)
Working Paper: Measuring Productivity Dispersion: Lessons From Counting One-Hundred Million Ballots (2017)
Working Paper: Measuring productivity dispersion:Lessons from counting one-hundred million ballots (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sef:csefwp:483

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Maria Carannante ().