The CFL programme has been introduced in 1985 to improve the youths occupational chances. It provides the employers some incentive to recruit young workers by reducing both the labour and the firing costs relative to those they would bear by recruiting older workers. Following the literature,...

The Italian debate on the wage differentials between Northern and Southern Italy has recently moved its research focus from "what is the dimension of the gap" to "how the gap can be measured - what kind of data are needed". Some authors argue that the use of administrative data, based on firm...

In this paper we investigate the relation between wage growth and labour mobility on a panel of Italian dependent workers observed between 1986 and 1991. We use an employer-employee linked panel of 30167 workers, built from Italian Social Security (INPS) administrative sources. In order to...

Why did employment growth - high in the last decade– take place at the expense of young workers in the countries of Central and Southern Europe ? This is the question addressed in this paper. Youth unemployment has approached or exceeded 20% despite a variety of factors, common to most EU...

This paper explores the “disposable” patterns of workforce utilization in Italy. The term “disposable” reflects the fact that people enter the labor market, their services are “used” as a disposable commodity for few years, after which they leave the labor market and are no longer...

What is the relationship, if any, between Experimental Economics and Agent-based Computational Economics? Experimental Economics (EXP) investigates individual behaviour (and the emergence of aggregate regularities) by means of human subject experiments. Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE),...

This paper looks at short employment spells in three European countries: the UK, whose labour market is considered the most flexible in the EU; Italy, regarded as the least flexible; and Germany, tightly regulated, but characterised by a deservedly famous apprenticeship system. In particular, it...