We investigate the causal impact of retirement on healthcare utilization using SHARE data for 10 European countries. We show that the number of doctor's visits and the probability of visiting a doctor more than four times a year (our measures of healthcare utilization) increase after retirement....

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...

We use linked employer-employee data to investigate the job satisfaction effect of unionisation in Britain. We depart from previous studies by developing a model that simultaneously controls for the endogeneity of union membership and union recognition. We show that a negative association...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the empirical evidence on the private returns to education in Italy. First, we show that, whilst returns to education in Italy (based on gross wages) are in line with the European average, educational attainment is generally much lower...

We study the recent evolution of the college wage gap with a unique data set that comprises two cohorts and 10 European countries from the early to mid 1980s to the mid to late 1990s. We find evidence of significant cross country differences in the level and dynamics of the gap. There is also...

Expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labor economists as a major determinant of educational attainment. In spite of this, the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce. In this paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the...

We analyse the effects of demographic and education changes on unemployment rates in Europe. Using a panel of European countries for the 1980-2000 period - disaggregated by cohort, gender and education -, we empirically test the economic effects of two stylised facts that have occurred in recent...

This paper investigates regional public-private wage differentials in Italy. Following the recent wave of reforms that significantly changed wage setting and employment relations in both sectors increasing decentralisation in collective bargaining and enforcing a privatisation of public sector...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of the boom in education on the wage structure in Europe. We use detailed information on the distribution of wages, estimated from microdata from 12 European countries from the beginning of the 1980's to the present, to analyse the changes both between...

We use survey data on cohorts of high school graduates observed before and after the Italian reform of tertiary education implementing the 'Bologna process' to estimate the impact of the reform on the decision to go to college. We find that individuals leaving high school after the reform have a...