The expansion of Western European production accelerated in the first half of 1997. Exports were the main engine, driven by a devaluation of European currencies and strong growth abroad. Domestic demand also picked up somewhat led by investment in machinery and equipment. Inflation remained at...

Public finance solutions to high unemployment in Europe have often been advocated during the past years. With unemployment concentrated among the young and unskilled, it has been suggested that the reduction of social security contributions for low wage earnings, financed by a carbon tax, could...

We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECDcountries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR with an informative priorbased on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben-efits and labour taxes so that our identification is not affected by the Faust...

This study provides an assessment of the features that, operating "inside the black box", shape the evolution of the Italian economy. In the first section the focus is placed on the functioning of the labour market at the aggregate level. The picture described suggest that the Italian labour...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. We present a theoretical model predicting that higher job security of parents and lower job security of children may delay emancipation. We then provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for...

Gavosto, Venturini, Villosio (1999) find that the impact of foreign workers on the wage of natives was positive. Such a result was partly to be expected, and therefore the effect of immigrants on native employment is analyzed here. Two aspects of the unemployment experience are taken into...

The diffusion of Temporary Work Agency (TWA) jobs originated a harsh policy debate and ambiguous empirical evidence. Results for the US, based on quasi-experimental evidence, suggest that a TWA assignment decreases the probability of finding a stable job, while results for Europe, based on the...

Despite the increased frequency of job loss for older workers in Europe, little is known on its effect on the work-retirement decision. Employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel for Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., a multivariate competing-risks hazard model is...

Labor market regulations have often been blamed for high and persistent unemployment in Europe, but evidence on their impact remains mixed. More recently, attention has turned to the impact of product market regulations on employment growth. This paper analyzes how labor and product market...

In this paper we use a direct measure of individual risk-aversion to examine the relationship between risk-aversion and unemployment. The traditional search model predicts that more risk-averse individuals have lower reservation wages and thus are less likely to be observed in unemployment. Our...