By casual empiricism, it seems that many firms take explicit account of the family ties connecting workers, often hiring individuals belonging to the same family or passing jobs on from parents to their children. This paper makes an attempt to explain this behaviour by introducing the assumption...

Public speaking is an important skill for career prospects and for leadership positions, but many people tend to avoid it because it generates anxiety. We run a field experiment to analyze whether in an incentivized setting men and women show differences in their willingness to speak in public....

We study the effect of a reduction in employment protection on fertility decisions. Using data from the Italian Labor Force Survey for the years 2013-2018, we analyze how the propensity to have a child has been affected by the 2015 Labor Market Reform, the so-called "Jobs Act", which has...

We analyze the effect of gender quotas on electoral participation by using a dataset regarding Italian municipal elections. Gender quotas were in force in Italy from 1993 to 1995. Given the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted using a gender quota. We identify a...

Does the peer effect vary with the field of study? Using data from a middle-sized public university located in Southern Italy and exploiting the random assignment of first year students to college accommodation, we find that roommate peer effects for freshmen enrolled in the Hard Sciences are...

By casual empiricism, it seems that many firms take explicit account of the family ties connecting workers, often hiring individuals belonging to the same family or passing jobs on from parents to their children. This paper makes an attempt to explain this behaviour by introducing the assumption...

Some recent theories of human capital investments show that firms could be interested in paying for the general training of their workers. However, when search costs are low because there is a large availability of skilled workers on the market (that is, when the skilled unemployment/vacancy...

The delegation of tasks to a subordinate and his access to key firm resources allow an organization to make optimal use of his knowledge and ability, but at the same time, thanks to on-the-job learning and the possibility of expropriation of these resources, this might increase the agent's...

On-the-job training of new employees is often realised through the help of experienced workers. Considering the lack of verifiability of the human capital transmission process and the loss of insiders' bargaining power deriving from it, we examine some firms' hiring policies, based on family...

Abstract. In this paper, we examine the allocation of tasks between a principal and an agent considering their incentives to provide effort, their different abilities in handling tasks, and transmission costs. We focus our attention on two tasks: the first may be handled by the principal or by...