A matching theory approach is utilised to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 legge Treu, which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. We re-parameterise the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

This paper estimates the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on workers' individual wages in a quasi-experimental setting, exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Accounting...

Recently, frontier techniques have been utilised in the measurement of countries' macroeconomic performance by constructing a "production set" where the outputs are some macroeconomic indicators, while the inputs collapse to a unit scalar. In the present study, a different approach is proposed....

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effect of a reform that introduced a cost for unjust dismissals only for firms below 15 employees, while leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We find that the increase in dismissal costs decreased...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

Employment protection may affect both productivity and capital investment because higher adjustments costs hamper allocative efficiency and may therefore affect both the optimal capital labor input mix and total factor productivity. To estimate the impact of dismissal costs on capital deepening...