This paper investigates the importance that market regulation and financial imperfections have in firm size. We analyse institutions affecting labour market as Employment Protection Laws (EPL) and Product Market Regulation (PMR). Moreover, we study the effects of these institutions on firm...

This paper aims to examine to what extent a "ladder" e.ect may contribute to explain changes in unemployment in Spain. The "ladder" e.ect arises when highly-skilled workers who do not find a job that matches their skills, accept jobs that were previously occupied by less qualified staff. We...

This paper uses a calibrated life cycle model to quantify the distributional effects of Social Security reforms. We focus only on two countries: Italy and France because they adopted two different strategies to cope with aging. While France marginally modified its defined pension plan, Italy...

A matching theory approach is utilised to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 legge Treu, which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. We re-parameterise the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

The paper investigates the international GDP synchronization within the international real business cycle framework (Backus, Kehoe and Kydland, 1992). It sheds new light on the comovement issue by highlighting the role of cross-country divergence in labor market institutions (LMIs). We first...

A matching theory approach is used to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 Treu Act (legge Treu), which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. We re-parameterize the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions (LMI) on business cycle (BC) synchronization. We first develop a two-country right-to-manage model of wage bargaining. We find that, following a symmetric demand change, cross-country differences in LMI generate divergent responses in...

This paper investigates the sources of business cycle comovement within the New Open Economy Macroeconomy framework. It sheds new light on the business cycle comovement issue by examining the role of cross-country divergence in labor market institutions. We first document stylized facts...