This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic states - over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor laws...

We use Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian LFS data (2002-2007) complemented with several other surveys to compare the profile of Baltic temporary workers abroad before and after EU accession with that of stayers and return migrants. Determinants of migration and return, as well as selection issues...

Can a policy intervention in the stressful first year after a birth affect marital stability? We examine this question using a large expansion in maternity benefits in 1982 in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program provided partially paid leave until the child's first...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

We exploit the Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006 to evaluate the indirect effects of a policy that randomly commutes actual sentences to expected sentences for 40 percent of the Italian prison population. We estimate the direct and indirect impact of the...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduatesﾒ work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000 inhabitant-increase in the size of the individualﾒs province of work reduces the chances of being an...

The Saint Valentine's decree (1984) and the ensuing hard fought referendum (1985), which reduced the automatisms of scala mobile, started a process of redefinition of wage fixing in Italy, which culminated with the final abolition of scala mobile (1992) and the approval of Protocollo d'intesa...

Using Local Labour Systems (LLSs) data, this work aims at assessing the effects of sectoral shifts and industry specialization patterns on regional unemployment in Italy over the years 2004-2008, when huge worker reallocation caused by changes in the international division of labour occurred....

Differently from most European countries and despite the recommendations on the part of the European Commission, Italy still misses a sufficiently systematic and nationwide mechanism of income support. In this paper we want to explore the feasibility, the desirability and the features of a...