The recent debate on Italy's unsatisfactory economic performance has been focused on the increasing competitive pressures exerted by foreign firms localized in low-wage developing countries and specialized in products where Italy used to hold a comparative advantage. This paper aims at...

We measure the share of foreign value added embedded in the domestic consumption expenditure of the Italian household sector as a whole and of households along the distribution of consumption expenditure. We find that for each euro spent for consumption by households, almost irrespective of...

We examine the role of information networks in job-search outcomes of displaced individuals. We draw on longitudinal Social Security records covering the universe of worker-firm matches in a tight labor market in Northern Italy. Unlike previous research, we focus on workplace networks whose...

The debate in Italy on the recent disappointing performance of GDP growth has focused on the increasing competitive pressure exerted by firms located in the developing countries and specialized in key product sectors of Italian manufacturing. This paper contributes by explicitly quantifying the...

After an earthquake hit Southern Italy in 1980, young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service. We show that the exemption raised high-school-graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points. We do this by comparing high-school-graduation rates of young...

We describe the evolution of the relative earnings of young male workers and the evolution of the age-earnings profiles across cohorts in the last three decades. We draw on administrative records to document a significant deterioration of entry wages over the 1990s in the presence of basically...