The paper consists of an empirical analysis of the separate as well as joint impacts on total and youth unemployment of indicators of labour market policies on the one hand, and the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” on the other. In particular, we investigate labour...

Italian university system was reformed in 2001. This paper tests the screening role of degree scores for 2004-Italian graduates. We find support of the strong screening hypothesis for prereform type degrees, while we do not find any evidence of signalling effects for post-reform 3-years degrees....

I employ distribution dynamics techniques to assess labor productivity convergence across Italian regions in the period 1980-2003. In particular, I investigate four different convergence hypotheses, namely: absolute, conditional, neoclassical and technological. Consistently with the majority of...

This paper applies the Dowrick and Rogers (2002) diffusion model to manufacturing sectors, identified by the technological content of their production, as according the taxonomy of Lall (2000b). The aim of the study is disentangling neoclassical from technological convergence, in a panel of 50...

We develop a stochastic general equilibrium model in which maintenance endogenously affects the capital depreciation rate. The model performs well in generating maintenance series that match closely existing survey-based measures for Canada. Maintenance is procyclical and comoves almost always...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, we investigate the effects generated by limited asset market participation on optimal monetary and fiscal policy, where monetary and fiscal authority are independent and play strategically. We find that limited asset market participation strongly...

Let (Xn) be a sequence of integrable real random variables, adapted to a filtration (Gn). Define: Cn = n^(1/2) {1/n SUM(k=1:n) Xk - E(Xn+1 | Gn) } and Dn = n^(1/2){ E(Xn+1 | Gn)-Z } where Z is the a.s. limit of E(Xn+1 | Gn) (assumed to exist). Conditions for (Cn,Dn) -- N(0,U) × N(0,V) stably...

An urn contains balls of d = 2 colors. At each time n = 1, a ball is drawn and then replaced together with a random number of balls of the same color. Let An =diag (An,1, . . . ,An,d) be the n-th reinforce matrix. Assuming EAn,j = EAn,1 for all n and j, a few CLT’s are available for such urns....

We propose a model characterized by strategic interactions among an endogenous number of producers and search and matching frictions in the labor market. In line with U.S. data: (i) new firms account for a relatively small share of overall employment, but they create a relevant fraction of new...