The flexicurity approach claims a positive effect of flexible labour on firm performance, also through an increased ability to innovate. Critics consider it a deregulation of the labour market, decreasing investment in human capital and innovation. We contribute to this broad debate providing an...

Entry into licensed professions requires meeting competency requirements, typically assessed through licensing examinations. In the market for lawyers, there are large differences in the difficulty of the entry examination both across states and over time. The paper explores whether the number...

We analyze the probability that an isolated system (being a birth-cohort) remains unchanged along time, thus obtaining an experimental survival probability which perfectly matches with the theoretical results found in part I.

This paper deals with the open issue about the choice between a centralized versus a decentralized public procurement strategy. Using a unique dataset on tender prices of selected drugs for hospital usage awarded by a sample of 52 Italian local health service providers (ASLs) between 2009 and...

As an answer to soaring oil prices, stabilization mechanisms based on specific taxes, such as the French Tipp flottante, have been discussed and introduced in some countries in early 2000s, but then soon abandoned. Our contribution aims at analysing the excise pass-through and the cost shifting...

The supply-side literature underscores two main concepts. Taxation usually harms growth and fiscal competition provides effective protection against excessive fiscal pressure. Understandably, governments tend to dislike fiscal competition, and strive to create fiscal cartels justified by the...

This paper analyses the effects of board composition on the behaviour and performance of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994-2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that...

Given a settled reduction in the present level of tax revenue, and by exploring a very large combinatorial space of tax structures, in this paper we employ a genetic algorithm in order to determine the optimal structure of a personal income tax that allows the maximization of the redistributive...