Purpose The purpose of this paper is to check the existence of the added worker effect (AWE) in Italy during the Great Recession. Design/methodology/approach The authors used the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth to study factors driving the change in female work status over...

Following suggestions from theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration and on social returns to education which emphasise the contribution of local knowledge spillovers to productivity and wage growth, this paper aims at uncovering the relationship between local human capital and...

In this paper I analyse the reasons for the low rate of growth of averagelevel of education in the South of Italy from the labour supply side point of view. In particular I try to develop a theoretical and empirical model based on the hypothesis that the lower income of southern families...

This paper discusses the thesis (recently pointed out by empirical evidence on Swiss data) that, if temporary contracts are utilised by firms as a tool to screen potential new employees and provide workers with a “stepping stone†into permanent employment, then temporary employees have...

In the last decade Italian and European labour markets have been characterized by a strong increase of temporary employment and the recent approval of the “Biagi Lawâ€1 is often assumed to be a factor to boost temporary work in Italy. Referring to some theoretical frameworks, we could...

The paper presents some significant results of the YOUTH project (Young in Occupations and Unemployment: THinking of their better integration in the labour market), promoted by the European Commission – DG Employment. The paper assumes that flexicurity is very important for young workers,...

According to theoretical and empirical evidence young workers are more likely to be overeducated than adult ones, especially in countries where the educational attainments of young people grow quickly and the school-to-work transition is difficult and/or lengthy. Nonetheless, if overeducation...