Among the steps to improve a country's competitiveness, several commentators and international institutions include a general emphasis on deregulation and decentralization of industrial relations. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by studying whether and how firm-level unionism and...

Liberalization of temporary contracts has been a hallmark of labor market reforms during the last decades. More recently, factors like the sovereign debt crisis pushed the most indebted countries to unprecedented reductions of employment protection legislation (EPL) also on open-ended contracts....

Inspite of the centralized nature of wage bargaining in Italy, we find some evidence suggesting the existence of firm-wage policies. Firstly, the ratio of the between-firm wage variability relative to total wage variability is sizeable, and not very dissimilar from that reported for other...