"When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings...

It is widely believed that rent-sharing reduces the incentives for investment when long term contracts are infeasible because some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. We propose a simple test for the degree of hold-up based on the fraction of capital costs that are deducted...

In this paper we study the evolution of the Italian wage inequality, and of its determinants, using two decades of matched employer-employee data covering the entire population of private-sector workers and firms in the Veneto region. We find that wage inequality has increased since the...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro-data from the Social Security Institute (INPS) to estimate the extent of nominal and real wage rigidity in Italy. Using a switching regime model of individual wage changes, which accounts for both the determinants of notional wage changes and...

This paper estimates the extent of downward wage rigidity in Italy using a micro-econometric model and the recently released WHIP longitudinal data. The econometric approach distinguishes between downward nominal wage rigidity – i.e., the impediment to nominal wage cuts – and downward real...

Using the 1985-99 "WHIP" data, we find a sizable amount of downward wage rigidity in Italy, with a prevalence of real over nominal rigidity. The results hold when real rigidity is identified either with reference to collective bargaining dispositions or to price inflation. Consistently with the...