In a simple model of social interaction I analyze the welfare effects of positive (prescriptive) and negative (proscriptive) social norms, together with the private incentives for their enactment. I find that imposing no law is socially optimal when individual actions have no significant...

In the late 1990s many European countries started comprehensive restructuring of their energy industries, the typical ingredients of the reforms are full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration, liberalization. In this paper we focus on the way in which energy sector reforms affect...

The aim of our work is to measure the impact of social origins on the choice of the academic track in order to allow for consistent cross-country comparisons. We analyze Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, employing the data from PISA 2003. A substantive problem is that a good measure of...

Economic theory and empirical evidence clearly show that social exclusion dimensions are inter-related. Notwithstanding that, dimensions are usually assumed independent from one another in the economics literature. In this paper we explore the inter-dependency of social exclusion dimensions and...

Administrative data from INPS (Italian Institute for Social Security) on Italian high tenure workers job-histories (15 years, from 1985 to 1999) is used to quantify the temporal pattern of the effect of displacement on workers’ earnings, employment and wages. Moreover, I distinguish different...

This article studies the dynamics and persistence of poverty in Italy during the nineties, using the ECHP, 1994-2001. Various definitions of poverty are analyzed in parallel, income poverty, subjective poverty and a multidimensional index of life-style deprivation. For each poverty definition,...

We use a 1998 - 2004 sample from WHIP in order to study the labor market transitions of young entrants. We consider seven labor market tates: permanent and temporary employment, apprenticeship, training pogrammes, self employment, quasi subordinate jobs and unemployment. After controlling for...

We provide a general characterization of diffusion processes, allowing to analyze both risk-sharing and contagion at the same time. We show that interdependencies are beneficial when the economic environment is favorable, and detrimental when the economic environment deteriorates. The risk of...

We analyse the effects of motherhood on women’s working career using WHIP, a database that records individual work histories together with childbearing events. We investigate two main issues: the career penalty and the wage penalty (better known in the literature as family wage gap). We focus...

The Framework Directive on Equal Treatment in Employment and Occupation (2000/78/EC) included age as one of its prohibited grounds of discrimination. Member States were required to transpose this Directive by December 2003. In Italy age discrimination was explicitly regulated by means of...