The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the empirical evidence on the private returns to education in Italy. First, we show that, whilst returns to education in Italy (based on gross wages) are in line with the European average, educational attainment is generally much lower...

We analyse the dynamics of firms' employment decisions which underlie lumpy and kinked adjustment costs. We consider a dynamic structural model in which, in each period, firms face a choice of whether to vary the labour input or to postpone the adjustment to the future. By exploiting the first...

By focusing on the Italian experience, we ask whether the relationship between labour taxes and unemployment varies across regions. In spite of similar national labour market institutions, we show that this relationship is significantly stronger in the highly industrialised North than in the...

Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education...

In this paper we study the determinants of investment decisions at the firm level with heterogeneous capital goods. We exploit a newly developed panel dataset of small and medium-sized firms which allows us to distinguish between purchases, sales, and net acquisitions of capital goods. We...

In the past decades self-employment has gained in importance in the majority of EU Member States. In particular the proportion of small and one-person businesses shows an increasing trend. In contrast to the classical research into business start-ups, which usually focuses on sustainability in...

Disability insurance - the insurance against the loss of the ability to work - is a substantial part of social security expenditures in many countries. The benefit recipiency rates in disability insurance vary strikingly across European countries and the US. This paper investigates the extent...

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

Many economic applications involve the modeling of a binary variable as simultaneously determined with one of its dycotomous regressors. In this paper we deal with a prominent health economics case study, that of cesarean section delivery utilization across public and private hospitals....