This paper examines the effect of shifts in the relative supply and demand of skills on the skill premiums and wage inequality in the British labour market 1972-2002. We test the Katz and Murphy (1992) hypothesis that the changes of skill premiums can be explained by their relative supply...

The article responds to Daniele and Malanima’s harsh criticism (Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro? Il Mezzogiorno fra storia e pubblicistica, Rivista di Storia Economica, 2014, n. 1) of my last book (Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, Il Mulino, 2013), about the reconstruction of regional...

This paper explores the macro-economic history of Cyprus in the inter-war period. It constructs the first detailed estimates of output at aggregate and sector levels, enabling the analysis of economic growth and the sectoral structure of the island’s economy. It evaluates its performance...

Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the...

The Great Depression in Germany led to the radicalization of the electorate, leading the country and then the world into the darkest days of Western Civilization. Could it have been otherwise? This paper explores whether the NSDAP takeover might have been averted with a fiscal policy that...

The paper is part of an ongoing process of estimating the GDP of Cyprus and Malta for the interwar period. The islands of Cyprus and Malta have always been considered as similar economically to other South-Eastern European states, despite the lack of historical evidence to prove it. The paper...

This paper studies a dynamic model with efficiency wages and adjustment costs associated with hiring and firing decisions. With linear adjustment costs, the optimal efficiency wage and employment are affected by the real interest rate and adjustment costs. When lumpy costs or convex adjustment...

The effects of the 1992-93 Income Policy Agreements on wages and wage differentials are analysed. In the last decade, both the aggregate real wages and their differentials among individual remained constant. Thanks to the effectiveness of the new Government target inflation, the national...

The proposed paper will discuss the controversy on Germany’s economic recovery after the Depression and the role Nazi work creation programs had therein. Economic data suggests evidence of a cyclical turning point of the economic crisis in the summer of 1932 with some leading indicators...

This paper analyzes labor demand at the sector level in the U.S., Germany and Sweden in two ways: by providing new computations of the sector elasticity of labor demand, and by evaluating the employment effects of trade in manufactures, services, agriculture and fuel. The elasticity is computed...