This note is intended to provide an initial assessment of the potentialities of the data reconstruction work, relating to labour market series, carried out as part of the SVIMEZ volume for the Sesquicentennial of the Unification of Italy. To this end, we develop some considerations on a key...

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

This paper employs recently developed non-stationary panel methodologies that assume cross-section dependence to estimate a production function for Italian regions over the 1970-2003 period. The analysis consists of three steps. First, unit root tests for cross-sectionally dependent panels are...

This paper explores the relationship between firm size distribution and technology. We analyse firm technology across selected manufacturing industries by means of a non-parametric production analysis, the Free Disposal Hull approach (Deprins et al., 1984; Kerstens and Vanden Eeckaut, 1999) and...

In this paper we analyse the determination of cost efficiency in a sample of Italian small banks located in different geographical areas and including two great institutional categories: cooperative banks (CB’s) and other banks. We highlight the effect of environmental factors (asset quality,...

We assess the impact on employment growth of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run trends in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. We find that the Strategy had some favourable (but weak) impact, especially for old-age workers. However, no improvement ensued from its...

To be successful in today’s knowledge economy, communities need to boost not only the skills of local people but also the utilisation and deployment of these skills by employers. By ensuring that skills are utilised effectively, local economies can become more competitive and host better...

In the 1990s the socio-economic disparities existing among the European regions, were significantly greater than those among countries, show persistent differences, and also a dynamic whereby periods of slow convergence alternate with others in which the tendency is towards divergence. We deal...

In this paper we appraise the existence of a negative relationship between the wage level and the unemployment rate (the wage curve) across Italian regions, using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The main advantage of this data-set is the availability of...