The Wage Curve in Italian Manufacturing Industry

The paper examines the Italian wage curve using the Capitalia survey of the Italian manufacturing firms over the 1998-2000 period, which contains data on about 4021 firms, and the Bank of Italy’s Historical Database from the Survey of Italian Household Budgets (1977-2000) over the period 1993-2000, containing data on about 7145 manufacturing employees. Evidence in favour of the existence of the Italian wage curve is found in the regressions of real wages over local unemployment on examining the data for sets of measured characteristics of employees and firms.