We assess the impact on employment growth of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run trends in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. We find that the Strategy had some favourable (but weak) impact, especially for old-age workers. However, no improvement ensued from its...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the current financial crisis on the determination of technical efficiency in a sample of Italian small banks, highlighting the interaction of the crisis with different regulatory regimes existing for cooperative banks (CB’s) and other banks. We find that...

Building on Layard and Jackman's framework, we propose a simple model to analyse the relation between labour productivity and unemployment regional differentials in Italy and present some panel data evidence to support the theoretical predictions of the model. The empirical analysis strongly...

Despite the centrality of the issue of labour market flexibility, attempts to consistently measure levels of flexibility, either within or across countries, have been remarkably scarce. This chapter makes a contribution towards filling this gap by presenting a complete set of labour market...

This paper aims at analyzing whether Labour Market Programs (ALMP) could have different effects on unemployment and employment dynamics according to the particular region where the program is implemented. To this end, the research analyses alternative theoretical and econometric models thought...

This essay attempts to understand the factors determining the satisfaction that volunteers derive from their own activity, and then to compare them with those determining the satisfaction of paid workers. The novelty of this approach is that volunteers and paid workers are compared in the same...

New Economic Geography models usually abstract from unemployment. By contrast, wage curve models (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1994) imply a negative correlation between regional unemployment and wages, but fail to account for agglomeration effects. Relying upon some stylised facts concerning the...

This paper surveys the now large body of theoretical and empirical literature on regional unemployment during transition in Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is on Optimal Speed of Transition models and on comparison of them with the neoclassical tradition. In the typical neoclassical...

This paper aims to analyse the relationships between firms’ location decisions and local labour markets functioning in a spatial economics perspective. In this way we are able to show that spatial factors are crucial to the design and implementation of labour policies since firms’ and...

This paper analyses Italian social cooperatives as a typical delivery service firm focusing on employee incentive systems characterized by “role tension” linked to the dual position of being employee and owner at the same time. In line with this idea, the answers to three questions: “Why...