The introduction of NDC public pension scheme in few European countries, such as Latvia, Sweden, Italy, and Poland, in the nineties was motivated, among other things, by the need (i) to ensure the long term financial sustainability of the public pension system by linking pension returns to...

Western Europe has welcomed its new members by shutting the door in the face of the workers coming from the East and making their road to EMU more difficult. Two years down the road of enlargement, some countries are now liberalizing worker flows. Indeed, as shown in this paper, these...

In many European countries, wages are determined by collective bargaining agreements intended to improve wages and reduce inequality. We study the local and aggregate effects of collective bargaining in Italy and Germany. The two countries have similar geographical differences in firm...

Firing frictions and renegotiation costs affect worker and firm preferences for rigid wages versus individualized Nash bargaining in a standard model of equilibrium unemployment, in which workers vary by observable skill. Rigid wages permit savings on renegotiation costs and prevent workers from...

Ten years after the start of transition, there are many puzzles we still have to live with. Why did all countries experience strong declines in output at the outset of economic transformations and most of them are slowly, if at all, recovering from this ?transitional recession?? How can these...

In the Italian public debate growing attention has been recently paid to ?household impoverishment?. Subjective indicators of economic condition show that this concern reflects a common sentiment of the Italian population. On the other hand, estimates based on the Bank of Italy?s Survey of...

European migration policies are characterised by a fundamental paradox: they are getting tighter and tighter just while public opinion is becoming more favourable to migrants and the immobility of European citizens expands the scope for spatial arbitrage, accruing the benefits, of immigration....

According to recent and largely untested theories, unemployment benefits (UBs) could improve the extent and quality of job reallocation even at the cost of increasing unemployment. Using yearly panel data from a large number of countries, we evaluate empirically the relationship between...

Standard models of equilibrium unemployment assume exogenous labour market institutions and flexible wage determination. This paper models wage rigidity and collective bargaining endogenously, when workers differ by observable skill and may adopt either individualized or collective wage...