Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms? hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms' hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Over the past 20 years, Italy has realised changes in labour legislation, leading to a decentralisation of wage bargaining and increased flexibility in labour relations. Both these factors have helped to curb wage growth and to enhance employment growth, but have also led to a crisis in Italian...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms' hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

In this paper it is shown that by explicitly considering the existence of unemployed trained workers, some of the results shown by Acemoglu and Pischke regarding the effect of unemployment on the firms' training decisions become ambiguous. In fact, two contrasting effects have to be considered:...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...

Some recent theories of human capital investments show that firms could be interested in paying for the general training of their workers. However, when search costs are low because there is a large availability of skilled workers on the market (that is, when the skilled unemployment/vacancy...

Empirical evidence suggests that networks of personal relations are important in the micro dynamics of labor markets: even in modern capitalistic economies a high share of jobs are filled by social referrals. This paper aims at shedding light on an apparent puzzle concerning the relationship...

This paper documents the evolution of sector-level collective agreements in Italy and estimates the wage effects of the diffusion of non-representative agreements, often signed by unknown organisations i.e. pirate agreements. Using employer-employee data from Social Security Archives, we find...

In this paper we show that rent sharing plays a role in explaining the glass ceiling effect. We make use of a unique employer-employee panel database for Italy from 1996 to 2003, which allows controlling for observed individual and firm heterogeneity and for collective bargaining. Moreover, by...