Data and Code for: Regional Differences in Public Sector Productivity and Managerial Talent

This paper studies the regional differences in the productivity of Italian Social Security Agency offices and whether they can be explained by differences in manager characteristics. Despite large dispersion in productivity across offices, most of the variation in productivity is within- rather than across regions. Managers are an important determinant of office productivity, but differences in their characteristics explain little of the cross-region differences in productivity. Because most of the variation in office productivity is within- rather than across-region, reassigning more productive managers to larger and more productive offices increases total (and within-region) inequality in output while decreasing across-region inequality.