In this paper I present evidence about the importance of demand for services in the development of the service sector. By comparing developments in demand for services in Italy, France, Germany and the US, I show that the contribution of final demand by European households to growth in output is...

Following the two surveys carried out in 2007 and 2009 on firms' price and wage setting practices, in June 2013 the ESCB's Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) conducted a third survey aimed at assessing, through a harmonised questionnaire, the most important transformations under way in the national...

This analysis aims at studying joblessness and the effect of the economic crisis at the household rather than the individual level. With respect to the main European countries, in Italy the jobless household rate is lower because of the larger household size (the more adults present the lower...

The 1998 reform of the Italian retail trade sector delegated to the regional governments the regulation of entry of large retail shops. We use the local variation in regulation to determine the effects of entry barriers on firm performance for a representative sample of medium and large retail...

Against the backdrop of continuing adjustment in EU labour markets in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) conducted the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in 2014-15 as a follow-up to the two previous WDN...

We use a general equilibrium model to show that a decrease in workers’ bargaining power amplifies the relative contribution to the output gap of adjustments along the extensive margin of labour utilization. This mechanism reduces the cyclical movements of marginal cost (and inflation) relative...

The paper analyzes the relationship between barriers to entry and employment in the Italian retail trade sector. In Italy the opening of large outlets is regulated at the regional level. By using differences-in-differences estimators I study the effects of the rules implemented in Abruzzo and...