This paper addresses the problem of the dualism of the Italian economy, particularly of its labor market. Although the Italian labor market is considered to be the most highly regulated among OECD countries, the unemployment rate in the North, which represents two thirds of the whole economy, is...

This paper uses efficiency wage theory and the existence of community-based sharing to hypothesize that labor markets in developing countries have multiple equilibria - the same economy can be stuck at different levels of unemployment with different levels of wages. The model is meant for...

Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number ofresearchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills incities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result,however, is that...

Starting from Professor Kornai´s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-termperspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performanceof the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. Wepresent in a simple form the...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkablywell in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simplerank-size rule known as Zipf´s law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is thechurning of industries...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...

Whether people of differing types can live happily together is one of the most important social and political questions concerning urban areas. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, such mixing seems extremely unlikely. While the theoretical result seems well supported in the context of...

This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countrieswith markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark...

Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent adramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Untilthe mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since thenlabor demand has picked up and...

Die Arbeitsmarktreformen der letzten Jahre haben die strukturellen Anpassungsproblemedes deutschen Beschäftigungsmodells zum Teil gelindert - allerdings sind noch längst nichtalle Schwierigkeiten überwunden...