The dramatic impact of the 2008 crisis on the Italian economy led to policy responses including structural reforms and labour market liberalisation to reverse the worrisome output and employment trends. A key action by the Italian government, the evocatively named Jobs Act of 2014, has deeply...

This article explores the impact of innovation, offshoring and demand on profits and wage dynamics. The growing relevance of functional distribution in terms of explaining personal distribution underscores the importance of our results for understanding recent increases in inequality. The...

Within-firm wage dispersion represents a relevant dimension of the overall wage inequality. A large stream of literature has analysed the wage-technology link without explicitly taking into account within-firm wage dispersion. In this work we aim to empirically investigate how technology affects...

In the aftermath of the crisis, Europe is becoming more polarised in terms of employment, competitiveness and industrial specialisation. A 'German-centred core' which maintained employment and production – has emerged, contrasted by a 'Southern periphery', where major economic losses have...

This article investigates the role of technology, education and wages in shaping the skill structure of employment considering the upswings and downswings of business cycles. We develop an econometric estimation of these relationships and carry out an empirical test at the industry level for...

The evidence on growing inequality in OECD countries has raised an important debate over its main drivers, pointing out an increasing importance of the capital-labour conflict. In this contribution, we aim at disentangling the role of some of the forces shaping this process. Our identification...

Law 183 of 2014, evocatively named the "Jobs Act", has determined a deep change in the Italian industrial relations. Bringing at completion a reform process begun in the 1990s, the Jobs Act has introduced a new contract type - "contratto a tutele crescenti" - implying a substantial downsize of...