We contribute to the long-standing debate on the Italian North-South divide by assessing the impact of public spending on social infrastructure - including education, healthcare, childcare and social assistance - on the gender employment gap over the last two decades, using a PSVAR analysis....

This paper evaluates if and to what extend the risk of becoming Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) has worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. The analysis is based on a unique dataset from the merging of two sample surveys, the Italian Labor Force Survey and the...

This paper takes advantage of access to detailed matched bank-firm data to investigate whether and how employment decisions of SMEs have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks’ financial health following the 2008 crisis is used as an...

This paper investigates the surge in Involuntary Part-Time (IPT) employment in Italy from 2004 to 2019, exploring its impact on various socio-economic groups and adopting a spatial perspective. Our study tests the hypothesis that technological shifts, specifically routine biased technological...

Using a unique Italian dataset covering the period 2004-2020, we assess the immigrant-native gap in entrepreneurship and investigate channels behind it. The data allows us to account for many observable characteristics as well as for risk aversion, which is usually not observed, yet crucial for...

This paper assesses the impact of the first wave of the pandemic on the local economies of one of the hardest-hit countries, Italy. We combine quarterly local labor market data with the new machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic...