This paper shows that the under-investment in firm financed training caused by hold up can justify the introduction of firing taxes in a laissez-faire economy with search frictions and risk neutral agents. More precisely we highlight two results. First, the introduction of a firing tax for newly...

Purpose: This paper examines two institutional aspects closely related: (i) the extent to which collective bargaining has been decentralized at firm or district level; (ii) the extent to which, at this level of bargaining, Performance Related Pay (PRP) have been used....

This paper analyses the role of Performance Related Pay (PRP) agreements on labour productivity and wages. Its main contribution is thus to investigate the effects of PRP on both dimensions, i.e. productivity and distribution, whereas most of the studies of related literature are restricted to...

This paper examines the main determinants of the adoption of performance-related pay (PRP) in Italy. The analysis is performed by merging cross-sectional information on the spread of PRP collected for 2005 by the ISFOL survey with balance sheet data, provided by the AIDA database for a panel of...

In this paper we investigate the influence of education of entrepreneurs, as signal of talent, on the adoption of contingent pay (CP) schemes in Italian manufacturing and service firms, an aspect so far not examined in related literature. We use data of Employer and Employee Survey (EES) for the...

Liberalisation of temporary contracts has become an important component of recent labour reforms but up to now available research has not paid attention to the impacts of these institutional changes on functional income distribution. The present paper intends to fill this gap by focussing on the...

Purpose – This study analyses the effects on productivity of Performance-Related Payments (PRP) and unions, and examines to what extent heterogeneity between firms characterises these influences. Design - For the Italian economy, the study presents firm-level quantile regressions for Total...

The present study examines cross-national and sectoral differences in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in fourteen European countries and ten sectors from 1995 to 2007. The main aim is to ascertain the role of employment protection of temporary contracts on TFP by estimating their effects with a...

This paper investigates the relation between wage structure, inequality and skill-biased change in Italy between 1993 and 2004. Using a quantile decomposition analysis, we point out that changes in wage structure are mainly driven by the negative coefficients component, which represents also one...