In the last decade the Italian economy has underperformed compared both with the previous decades and with the main European countries. It is widely acknowledged that this evolution reflects unresolved structural problems, which have become more urgent in view of the major changes in the world...

The fall in employment and the increase in unemployment rates in Italy in 2009 were fairly modest, given the sharp drop in GDP and compared with the recession of the early 1990s. This work shows that these data should be interpreted with caution, however. Firstly, employment trends as measured...

In the last decade, and especially in the course of the recent global economic slowdown, the gap between southern and northern industry has widened. Industrial investment and employment decreased more sharply in the South than in the rest of Italy, and the contribution of the southern regions to...

Unobservable labor utilization is recognized as a crucial feature of economic fluctuations. Yet very little is known on the behavior of work effort over the business cycle. By using firm-level panel data drawn from two high-quality sources, we obtain a microeconomic estimate of variable labor...

A large literature investigates the role of frictions in explaining labour market dynamics. Their presence is often summarized by an aggregate matching function relating the number of job matches to total unemployment and total vacancies. Most empirical specifications, however, are only reduced...

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men�s and women�s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on a unique panel data set from the Italian Labor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local...

This paper employs a unique Italian data source to take a comprehensive approach to labor market pooling. It jointly considers many different aspects of the agglomeration - labor market relationship, including turnover, learning, matching, and hold up. It also considers labor market pooling from...

We suggest the use of an index of Internet job-search intensity (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US monthly unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more...

This paper studies how family firms reacted to the 2008 economic crisis by adjusting employment. In particular, we look at how the geographical distribution of the workforce may have led to divergencies between family and non-family firms. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we provide...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic consequences of the establishment of a monetary union in the presence of unionized labor markets. It is shown that the effects of the formation of a monetary union depend on several labor market festures, such as the degree of centralization of wage...