Among the steps to improve a country's competitiveness, several commentators and international institutions include a general emphasis on deregulation and decentralization of industrial relations. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by studying whether and how firm-level unionism and...

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore whether temporary jobs are a port of entry into permanent employment and to argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered. Design/methodology/approach – The paper bases its empirical evidence on a...

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore whether temporary jobs are a port of entry into permanent employment and to argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered. Design/methodology/approach – The paper bases its empirical evidence on a...

This article studies the dynamics and persistence of poverty in Italy during the nineties, using the ECHP, 1994-2001. Various definitions of poverty are analyzed in parallel, income poverty, subjective poverty and a multidimensional index of life-style deprivation. For each poverty definition,...

We show that the Italian wage curve, inexistent in the eighties and early nineties, has re-emerged after the 1993 Income Policy Agreements, owing to the greater role granted to flexible and locally bargained top-up wage components.

Using three waves of a uniquely rich survey on Italian private firms, we explore the impact of female managers on the use of part-time work. Building on a literature arguing that female leaders are more sensitive to their employees' needs and more self-transcendent than their male counterparts,...

In this paper we study the evolution of the Italian wage inequality, and of its determinants, using two decades of matched employer-employee data covering the entire population of private-sector workers and firms in the Veneto region. We find that wage inequality has increased since the...

When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings...