The European Employment Strategy stresses the role of human capital accumulation, to increase via reforms of the education system and active labour market policy on a large scale, as the main instruments against unemployment. We argue that these instruments might be more effective than...

This paper discusses the nature and characteristics of the youth labour market in Europe and Central Asia. The central concern is with the policy response to the substantial youth unemploymen problem emerging with the transition to the market in Central & Eastern Europe and Central Asia (CEECA)....

A 1997 report by the Council of Economic Advisers started a large research effort about the effects of the unemployment rate on the welfare participation rate and vice-versa, with special regard to the 1990s in the United States. In this paper the relationship between the US unemployment rate...

Many indicators (OECD 1994) show that the Italian labour market is characterised by a strong pro-workers and pro-unions legislation. This is usually interpreted as a high degree of rigidity. According to the theory of appropriability in presence of putty-clay investments (Caballero and Hammour...

The work offers a new treatment of the labour market effects of international trade building on recent developments in the literature on intra-industry trade (IIT) stressing the importance of vertical IIT. The central idea is that heterogeneity of traded goods plays a crucial role both in terms...

In this paper we are trying to evaluate the differential impact of Outward Processing Traffic (OPT) flows with respect to the final trade flows on the labour markets of EU countries. In particular, two EU countries are investigated, Germany and Italy, because of their relevance on total EU-CEEC...

The research deals with the characteristics of the irregular labour. Current literature considers that irregular labour arises because of the heavy tax burden on labour, or because of the existence of regulations which impose too many constraints on the labour market. In Italy the labour market...

This paper provides evidence of the gender wage gap among young people (18-24) in Italy based on the YUSE data set and involves the Oaxaca and Ransom (1994) decomposition of the unconditional gender wage gap into discrimination and productivity components. About 70% of the overall gap is...

This paper evaluates the possible effects of advertising on conditions of entry in a market with one incumbent and one potential entrant. Through a game-theoretic framework, it is shown that the use of pre-entry advertising expenditures (which are supposed to exhibit diminishing returns) may...

This paper aims at analyzing whether Active 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...