This paper will be published in M. Magara and S. Sacchi (eds.), The Politics of Social and Industrial Reform, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, forthcoming in 2013.

We test whether labor flexibility acts as a substitute to delocalization. Using Italian survey data, we show that a higher share of temporary workers appears to reduce the likelihood of future offshoring. However, once reverse causality and spurious correlation are controlled for with IV...

Forecasting based on random intercepts models requires imputation of the individual permanent effects to the simulated individuals. When these individuals enter the simulation with a history of past outcomes this involves sampling from conditional distributions, which might be unfeasible. I...

L’assicurazione contro la disoccupazione involontaria in molti paesi sviluppati costituisce uno dei cardini delle politiche di sostegno del reddito dei lavoratori. In Italia, invece, ha un ruolo piuttosto marginale. Inoltre, è da molti anni oggetto di critiche, segnatamente per il basso tasso...

A key issue in increasing women’s participation in productive activities is the possibility of achieving a high work-life balance, both in terms of personal wellbeing and in terms of fair career prospects. The crucial event that challenges any level of work-life balance working women achieve...

Dynamic microsimulation modeling involves two stages: estimation and forecasting. Unobserved heterogeneity is often considered in estimation, but not in forecasting, beyond trivial cases. Non-trivial cases involve individuals that enter the simulation with a history of previous outcomes. We show...

This paper analyzes the implications of unobserved heterogeneity in discrete-time, discrete-choice microsimulation models. We compare the predictions coming from simple pooled probit estimates with those obtained using random effect dynamic probit models, in a dynamic microsimulation of...

Starting from an agent-based interpretation of the well-known Bass innovation diffusion model, we perform a Montecarlo analysis of the performance of a method of simulated moment estimator. We show that nonlinearities of the moments lead to a small bias in the estimates in small populations, and...

“The road” is anthropologically linked to the history of the human being, and therefore also to the economic history. Specifically, “the road” is important quantitative element as a factor in the opportunity cost in the traffic of goods, commodities and people but also, on a more...

This report is one of the outputs resulting from Workpackage 5, "Stakeholder policies and problem assessment" of the WALQING project, SSH-CT-2009-244597 (www.walqing.eu).