The process of economic globalization has winners and losers. Iran's carpet industry provides a good illustration of the adverse side of this process. As the production costs of its rivals have fallen, surging international trade has reduced the market share of Iran's labor-intensive products,...

Till the early-1990s the collectively-bargained labor contract (between the trade-union that presented the employees, and the employer or the employers'-association) was the norm, granting salaried workers a stable and protected labor contract. Thereafter, and more significantly after 1995, the...

This paper documents the evolution of sector-level collective agreements in Italy and estimates the wage effects of the diffusion of non-representative agreements, often signed by unknown organisations i.e. pirate agreements. Using employer-employee data from Social Security Archives, we find...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

This paper analyses the characteristics of employer association in Italy, using unique firm-level data with information on employers' affiliation choices as well as their characteristics. We document that a persistent decline in affiliation rates to employers' associations has occurred during...

Labour market theories allowing for search frictions make marked predictions on the effect of the degree of frictions on wages. Often, the effect is predicted to be negative. Despite the popularity of these theories, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker-firm data. The...

This paper surveys the existing empirical research that uses search theory to empirically analyze labor supply questions in a structural framework, using data on individual labor market transitions and durations, wages, and individual characteristics. The starting points of the literature are...

We define the wage incentive to management as the wage premium the manager earns because of his/her supervising role. We adopt an approach based on what if questions and estimate the premium at different quantiles of the distribution of wages for 26 European economies. To ease comparisons we...

US earnings inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and the prospect of a reversal depends on what caused the trend. The standard explanation emphasizes skill-biased technical change. This paper briefly considers some aggregation issues and then proceeds to outline two alternative...