We analyse the effects of an active labour market program for disadvantaged workers recently implemented in an Italian depressed area. Our sample includes 859 workers, mostly women, who entered the program before April 2008 and were subsequently interviewed in 2009-10. We complement the existing...

Purpose – We analyse the effect of unemployment and labour institutions such as employment protection legislation, coverage of unemployment benefits, minimum wages, union power and tax wedge on migration flows. We allow for interactions of these institutions with migration entry laws, as both...

In this paper we test for the hold-up problem by considering the effect of unions’ bargaining power on the rate of growth of investment per worker and labour productivity across sectors characterised by different levels of sunk capital investments. We develop a search and matching model with...

Using data for 51 manufacturing and service sector for the period 1970-2005 in 14 countries, this paper show that employment protection legislation has a negative and significant effect on growth of value added and hours of work in more human capital intensive sectors. We argue that labour...

This paper provides estimates of wage returns to experience, firm, sector and occupation specific tenure for a sample of young Italian male workers. By comparing returns obtained using different estimators, I evaluate the importance of endogeneity and selection problems generated by specific...

This paper studies gender wage differentials by providing a maximum likelihood structural estimation of the frictional parameters of an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and firm heterogeneity. In a second step, I also consider the role of discrimination. Results indicate higher...

This paper studies gender wage differentials in Italy using first-order predictions of monopsony-search models. It compares empirical predictions of these models against other competing ones of wage determination in non-competitive settings. The paper looks at the empirical relevance of the...

This paper analyses the growth effects of high levels of human capital at the industry level. By favouring technology adoption, human-capital-intensive industries grow faster compared to less human-capital-intensive industries in economies that have higher levels of human capital. Using data for...

This paper provides a structural estimation of an equilibrium search model with on-thejob search and heterogeneity in firms productivities using a sample of Italian workers. Allowing for productivity differentials among firms, the model is able to fit the wage distribution satisfactorily....

The evidence of persistent differentials in the growth and in the labour market performance among regions of Europe calls for a comprehensive analysis of the recent evolution of the position of the more backward area within the European Union. Evolution of regional differentials in GDP per head...