This paper investigates the importance that market regulation and financial imperfections have in firm size. We analyse institutions affecting labour market as Employment Protection Laws (EPL) and Product Market Regulation (PMR). Moreover, we study the effects of these institutions on firm...

This paper aims to examine to what extent a "ladder" e.ect may contribute to explain changes in unemployment in Spain. The "ladder" e.ect arises when highly-skilled workers who do not find a job that matches their skills, accept jobs that were previously occupied by less qualified staff. We...

This paper uses a calibrated life cycle model to quantify the distributional effects of Social Security reforms. We focus only on two countries: Italy and France because they adopted two different strategies to cope with aging. While France marginally modified its defined pension plan, Italy...

A matching theory approach is utilised to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 legge Treu, which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. We re-parameterise the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

We estimate a stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and longevity in the U.S. over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change and the increase in the...

We study the effects of liquidity constraints and start-up costs on the relationship between wealth and the fraction of entrepreneurs in an economy. We develop a dynamic occupational choice model with endogenous wealth and entry into entrepreneurship. The model predicts that, with liquidity...

We use a calibrated stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and life expectancy over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change along with the increase in the...

This paper investigates how Italian labour market institutions influence business cycle fluctuations. We apply a DSGE model that features Italian labour market rigidities and we estimate the latter on Italian data using Bayesian techniques to assess the effects of demand, supply, and labour...

This paper sheds light on the causal relationship between education and health outcomes. We combine three surveys (SHARE, HRS and ELSA) that include nationally representative samples of people aged 50 and over from fourteen OECD countries. We use variation in the timing of educational reforms...