Macroeconomically oriented wage policies had largely gone out of fashion. Instead, the prevailing view was that wage setting is just another market process comparable to market processes in goods markets. However, these theoretical approaches ignore some fundamental aspects of wage setting. For...

When information about workers? abilities is imperfect, past employment histories are important determinants of unemployment duration. This paper studies the effects of employment protection laws on unemployment spells in two countries: Italy and Spain

The study aims at describing productivity growth in the manufacturing sector for a selected panel of five European countries using firm-level data. The paper explores the empirical regularities of firm productivity distribution across countries. In particular, we assess the degree of persistence...

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...