This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

This essay discusses the determinants of youth unemployment within the EU and then the alternative policy options currently at stake. We argue that youth unemployment regards especially some peripheral EU countries and is due to a mix of factors that should be addressed more vigorously, starting...

This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

This paper aims to survey the theoretical and empirical literature on cross-country differences in overeducation. While technological change and globalization have entailed a skill-bias in the evolution of labour demand in the Anglo-Saxon countries, instead, in other advanced economies in...

Unlike in many other transition countries, where the gender pay gap has remained stable while female employment rates have reduced, in the case of Belarus women' activity rate has been practically unchanged despite an increase in the gender pay gap. This paper investigates why this is the case...

Relatively little is known about the youth labour market in general and about gender differences in Mongolia, one of the fifty poorest countries in the world. This paper addresses the issue by taking advantage of a School to Work Survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15-29 years carried out in...

This essay aims to discuss the conditions for a successful implementation of the European Youth Guarantee in Italy. In principle, the program should be able to affect the frictional and mismatch components of unemployment, if not the Keynesian and neoclassical ones, as the experience of...

This paper provides the first available evidence on overeducation/overskilling based on AlmaLaurea data. We focus on jobs held 5 years after graduation by pre-reform graduates in 2005. Overeducation/overskilling are relatively high - at 11.4 and 8% - when compared to EU economies. Ceteris...

The school-to-work transition represents a long dark tunnel for too many young people all over the world. Nonetheless, cross-country differences are striking: in Germany, young people fare no worse than their adult counterparts, while in the South- and Eastern-European Union countries young...

Italy has an immobile social structure. At the heart of this immobility is the educational system, with its high direct, but especially indirect cost, due to the extremely long time necessary to get a degree and to complete the subsequent school-to-work transition. Such cost prevents the...