We document the effects of a change in the Italian Ordinary Unemployment Benefits Scheme on the job search process. As of January 2001, the replacement rate was raised from 30% to 40% and benefits' duration extended from 6 to 9 months for workers aged 50 or more. Our results show that (a) the...

We test whether natives correctly assess the effects of immigration on their own labour market opportunities. We relate self-reported job loss and job finding probabilities to the presence of foreign-born residents in a native's neighborhood. We interpret coefficient estimates through the lens...

I consider an economy growing along the balanced growth path that is hit by an adverse shock to its capital accumulation process. The model integrates efficiency wages due to imperfect monitoring of the quality of labour in a search and matching framework with methods of dynamic general...

We suggest the use of an index of Internet job-search intensity (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US monthly unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more...

The fall in US labor force participation during the Great Recession stands in sharp contrast with its parallel increase in the euro area. In addition to structural forces, cyclical factors are shown to account for this phenomenon, with the participation rate being procyclical in the US from the...

In this paper I analyse whether non-employment periods at the initial stages of an individual’s career may increase workers’ propensity to experience non-employment also in subsequent years. The study is based on data on young individuals in Italy. The paper uses an instrumental variables...

The paper assesses the extent to which mortgage rates in Italy are priced according to credit risk as proxied by the probability of household mortgage delinquency estimated using the EU-Silc database. For reasons of data availability we restrict the analysis of mortgage pricing to Italian...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether domestic and foreign activities of Italian firms are mainly substitutes or complements. We take advantage of a unique firm-level panel data set from the Bank of Italy Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, which provides information on the...

Optimal Portfolio Theory prescribes that investors reduce their exposure to financial market risk as they get near to retirement. To assess the effect of ageing on portfolio choices, we study the case of an Italian defined contribution pension fund during the period 2002-08. We find that on...