This paper provides an overview of the employment situation of young and old workers in the EU Member States, setting out the most recent development during the crisis and dealing with policies implemented to promote the employment of both groups. The evidence collected shows that there is no...

Two-tier bargaining structures, in which plant-level wage negotiations supplement industry-level wage setting, are present in a number of EU countries, as unions resist pressures for greater decentralization in wage determination. In principle, these two-tier structures could reconcile...

All OECD countries have either legally mandated severance pay or compensations imposed by industry-level bargaining in case of employer initiated job separations. According to the extensive literature on Employment Protection Legislation such transfers are either ineffective or highly...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

Firing frictions and renegotiation costs affect worker and firm preferences for rigid wages versus individualized Nash bargaining in a standard model of equilibrium unemployment, in which workers vary by observable skill. Rigid wages permit savings on renegotiation costs and prevent workers from...

In the Italian public debate growing attention has been recently paid to “household impoverishment”. Subjective indicators of economic condition show that this concern reflects a common sentiment of the Italian population. On the other hand, estimates based on the Bank of Italy’s Survey of...

Convergence to the Lisbon employment targets requires absorbing large pools of long-term jobseekers, increasing labour force participation and dealing with a sizeable informal sector, composed for the most of low-productivity jobs. The purpose of this paper is to review the main design features...

European migration policies are characterised by a fundamental paradox: they are getting tighter and tighter just while public opinion is becoming more favourable to migrants and the immobility of European citizens expands the scope for spatial arbitrage, accruing the benefits, of immigration....