This paper investigates the effect of the lockdown on COVID-19 infections. After the 22nd of March 2020, the Italian government shut down many economic activities to limit the contagion. Sectors deemed essentials for the economy were, however, allowed to remain active. We exploit the...

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the effort they exert in political life. If...

This paper provides the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experiment for home visits checking on sick leave in the public sector. The experiment was carried out in Italy, a country with large absenteeism in the public sector, and it concerned the universe of public employees....

Flexible work arrangements are on the rise in many countries, ranging from Germany's mini-jobs to UK's zero-hours contracts. These contracts allow for quick labor demand adjustments and are also seen as a way to discourage undeclared work, and more than 10 years ago Italy introduced what was...

Using a matched employer-employee dataset on Italy we look at the spatial distribution of wages among provinces. We find evidence of both urbanization and market potential externalities, with the second one being more relevant. However, spatial sorting of skills is at work and explains a great...

In this paper we analyze the evolution of Educational wage premia (Ewp) in the Italian private sector. Drawing upon the Household income and wealth survey (Bank of Italy) we show that Ewp showed a general decrease between 1993 and 2004, at all quantiles of the wage distribution. Our findings do...

In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concerning Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country according to OECD. In particular, worker flows computed from both social security dataset and LFS are...

In this paper we show that wage inequality decreased in the Italian private sector, both in the upper and in the lower tail of the distribution, in the period 1993-2006. By applying a quantile decomposition procedure we find that the decrease of the 90/50 ratio is almost totally related to a...

This paper investigates theoretical and empirical links between job tenure and short-term mobility wage gains. Standard theoretical approaches examining this subject predict a negative correlation between these variables. Furthermore, this result has been confirmed in different applied...

In the last decade the European Employment Strategy strongly recommended reforms of active labour market policies, reforms that have generated a spread of evaluation exercises for most of European countries. This paper fills the gap in the literature concerning the Italian case, assessing the...