Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced...

We investigate public-private pay determination using French, British and Italian microdata. While traditional methods focus on parametric methods to estimate the public sector pay gap, in this paper, we use both non-parametric (kernel) and quantile regression methods to analyse the distribution...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. We present a theoretical model predicting that higher job security of parents and lower job security of children may delay emancipation. We then provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for...

Using microdata on the 1995 cohort of Italian high school graduates, this paper studies the relationship between the type of high school attended (general versus technical; private versus public) and indicators of subsequent performance. Simultaneity issues that potentially bias this type of...

This paper uses Italian panel data to analyse transition probabilities at the bottom of the earnings distribution during the 1990s. The analytical framework is characterised by the ability to account for the endogeneity of initial conditions, educational attainment and earnings attrition,...

In this paper we use newly available individual-level data from the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households to investigate the factors affecting female labour force participation after the birth of the first child. We focus on the effects of pre-marital job characteristics and find that...

The microeconomic empirical literature devoted to the link between innovation and employment tends to suggest that technological change has a positive effect on jobs, at least at the level of the firm. The main purpose of this paper is to see whether this result still holds in a situation where...

In this paper we use individual micro data on workers combined with industry and regional data to study the dynamics of the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers in Italy in the period 1991-1996. Being different to previous empirical studies, our data allow us to explore in a...

Barriers to homeownership have traditionally been an important research and policy issue. In particular, the role of income volatility and credit constraints have been one of the main focuses in this concern. In this paper we test for the first time whether the underlying nature behind the...

According to the agenda for employment set by the EU in 2000 for the following ten years, the target for female employment was set at 60 per cent for the year 2010. While Northern and most Continental countries have achieved this quantitative target, the Mediterranean countries are lagging...