The standard approach to the estimation of unemployment persistence assumes that quantile parameter heterogeneity does not matter. Using panel quantile autoregression techniques on state-level data for the United States (1980-2010), we suggest that it does.

Local Development that Money Can't Buy: Italy's Contratti di Programma The paper evaluates the effectiveness of a major Italy's place-based policy (Contratti di Programma), through which the Government endorses and finances an industrialization plan proposed by private firms. By using as...

Marshallian Labor Market Pooling: Evidence from Italy This paper employs a unique Italian data source to take a comprehensive approach to labor market pooling. It jointly considers many different aspects of the agglomeration labor market relationship, including turnover, learning, matching, and...

The paper uses the consolidation of municipalities brought about by the Fascist dictatorship in Italy during the 1920s to gauge the role of the size of local jurisdictions for economic development. It finds that the consolidation was associated with relevant net welfare gains for the communities...

This note argues that the solutions to the euro-area crisis proposed by the EU governing institutions in cooperation with the IMF, based on further austerity and wage cuts, will worsen the crisis. They are unlikely to reduce both sovereign and external debt ratios of countries experiencing these...

A well-established empirical literature suggests that individual wages are persistent. Several theoretical arguments support this empirical finding. Yet, the standard approach to the estimation of schooling returns does not account for this fact. This paper investigates the consequences of...

Wage inequality is a highly debated topic in policy and academic circles. Policy makers typically consider that a policy promoting the equalization of education levels among the individuals of a society - pushing everybody towards tertiary education - is a good strategy to fight wage inequality....

The standard wage equation proposed by Mincer (1974) assumes that individuals start working after leaving school, which is not the actual case for many people. Using longitudinal data on Portuguese male workers, former working students, we estimate the total impact of an additional year of...

This paper provides further evidence on the positive impact of schooling on within-groups wage dispersion in Portugal, using data on male workers from the 2001 wave of the European Community Household Panel. The issue of schooling endogeneity is taken into account by using the newest available...

This paper argues in favor of a dynamic specification of the Mincer equation, where past observed earnings play the role of additional explanatory variable for current observed earnings. A dynamic approach offers an explanation why the return to schooling in terms of observed earnings is not...