The economic crisis has given rise to significant challenges to the welfare state. Given that welfare expenses account for a large proportion of all state spending in the member countries of the European Union, reducing government spending means cutting welfare measures. Yet social protection,...

The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact on national labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also varied greatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurance benefits and minimum...

This paper presents estimates of the welfare and poverty effects of a price increase in a major food commodity in an underdeveloped country. We use household data from a Zambian survey to estimate a demand system with which various price scenarios can be simulated for the main Zambian staple and...

Abstract not available.

This paper investigates whether a public sector premium exists after controlling for observable characteristics and for additional motivations, other than monetary, that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector. We study the entire conditional wage distribution on Italian...

We investigate the public-private pay gap in Italy in the period 1998-2008. Under random sampling we estimate an average wage di_erential in favour of public sector workers of about 14% for women and 4% for men, lower at the high tail of the wage distribution and in the Northern regions. The...

We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC....

On the basis of a unique dataset referring to all 8,100 Italian municipalities and providing details of their balance-sheets, local governments’ features, socio-demographic and economic indicators, we analyze the determinants of the local cultural expenditures. We exploit the panel nature...

Many economic time series exhibit important systematic fluctuations within the year, i.e., seasonality. Differently from usual practice, we argue that using original data should always be considered, although an unadjusted data process is more complicated than that of seasonally adjusted data....