The sustainability of Welfare States requires high employment/high participation to raise the tax base and avoid distortions. To analyse labour market participation decisions in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a three-state macro model of the labour market. We show that...

While confounding factors typically jeopardise the possibility of using observational data to measure peer effects, field experiments offer the possibility of obtaining clean evidence. In this Paper we measure the output of four randomly selected groups of individuals who were asked to fill...

The prevalence of shirking within a large Italian bank appears to be characterized by significant regional differentials. In particular, absenteeism and misconduct episodes are substantially more prevalent in the south. We consider a number of potential explanations for this fact: different...

Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey’s optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labour supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. But in this paper we also explore differences in gender...

Firms are the field of several strategic interactions that standard neo-classical analysis often ignores. Such strategic considerations concern relations between capital owner and labour, relations between marginal employees and incumbents and more generally all relations between different...

This Paper suggests that in the US context, workers tend to invest in general human capital especially since they face little employment protection and low unemployment benefits, while the European model (generous benefits and higher duration of jobs) favours specific human capital investments....

Wages may be observed to increase with seniority because of firm-specific human capital accumulation or because of self-selection of better workers in longer jobs. In both these cases the upward sloping wage profile in cross-sectional regressions would reflect higher productivity of more senior...

Countries react differently to large labour reallocation shocks. Some minimize the costs by adapting rapidly, while others suffer long periods of costly adjustment, typically high and persistent unemployment and temporary output losses. We argue that the existence of large amounts of specific...

In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labour, the bargaining...