Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialized countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this well-known fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by the immigrants) or to an...

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between individual skills and labour market performance of immigrants residing in Lombardy during the period 2001-2005. We use a recent dataset collected by the NGO ISMU, which includes information on individual characteristics and the legal...

Results from international standardized tests show large cross-country differences in students' performances. Where do these gaps come from? This paper argues that differences in cultural environments and parental inputs may be of great importance. We show that the school performance of...

We assess the impact of low-skilled immigration on capital intensity. We first present a model characterized by frictions in the labor market and firms' asymmetric information on workers' skills and show that firms can react to the immigration-induced reduction of their workforce's skill level...

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....

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...