In Britain about 7% of male employees and 10% of female employees are in temporary jobs. In contrast to much of continental Europe - with stricter employment protection provisions - this proportion has been relatively stable over the 1990s. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, and...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the changes in the Italian wage distribution using administrative data from 1985 to 1996. Various statistical indicators are used to document a slight, but not negligible, increase in wage inequality. Standard decompositions of inequality indices by...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro-data from the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS) to estimate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity. The determinants of wage changes are explicitly modelled, as is the measurement error deriving from the fact that earnings inclusive...

The issue of high skilled migration is of increasing importance in the policy debates in a diverse set of countries, however, very little is know about the effects and the magnitude of high skill migration also because data on this topic are very scarce. The debate about the effect of...

The CFL programme has been introduced in 1985 to improve the youths occupational chances. It provides the employers some incentive to recruit young workers by reducing both the labour and the firing costs relative to those they would bear by recruiting older workers. Following the literature,...

The availability of a flexible labour force might influence adjustment decisions regarding the rigid part of the labour force. To test this idea, we contrast the use of trainees (fixed-term contracts) and normal-contract workers (open-end contracts) when a reform made it more costly to use...

This paper aims at analysing, both theoretically and empirically, possible determinants of firm's demand of occupations. Even if traditionally neglected within economics literature, this issue can, in fact, be very useful for Economics, as this paper tries to shows. The theoretical analysis...

This paper presents some artificial stylised facts emerging in a simulated contestable market where firms interact with each other in taking their stay or go decision. I use nearly zero-intelligence firms: no optimisation is considered, and all the firms sell at a fixed price an equal quantity...

In this paper I give a tentative assessment of the methodological status of agent based simulations. I first show under which conditions ABS can be a complement to traditional modelling. I then consider whether they can be held as a sound methodology of their own. Various topics relevant to the...

This study uses ECHP data to give insights on the characteristics of people whose self-assessment of labour status differs from that of the LFS. We do some ‘labour accounting’, in order to clarify the connection between individual perception and LFS categorisation. We find that discrepancies...