Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of training activity on labor productivity in a panel of Italian firms. Design/methodology/approach – The use of a large panel data of individual firms allows the author to properly account for the possible endogeneity of...

This Paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper describes an empirical study of the implications of agents' heterogeneity for theories of macroeconomic fluctuations based on the role of financial variables. Models of explicit distribution dynamics are applied to company account data from a panel of US manufacturing firms to...

This paper presents an application of the hedonic approach to measure the monetary price of social relations. We use micro data for housing and labor markets in the 103 Italian province capitals to estimate the price of relational amenities and construct monetary indices of quality of relational...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the objective function of economic agents is non-separable in economic incentives and social preferences. We study fixed-prize contests in a 2×2 experimental design, varying orthogonally the degree of competition of the incentive mechanism (all-pay...

C<sc>olombo</sc> E., M<sc>ichelangeli</sc> A. and S<sc>tanca</sc> L. <italic>La dolce vita</italic>: hedonic estimates of quality of life in Italian cities, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper investigates quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. It analyses micro-level data for housing and labour markets to estimate...

This paper shows how to maximize revenue when a contest is noisy. We consider a case where two or more contestants bid for a prize in a stochastic contest where all bidders value the prize equally. We show that, whenever a Tullock contest yields under-dissipation, the auctioneerʼs revenue can...

One of the key issues for understanding reciprocity is how agents evaluate the kindness of an action. In this paper we investigate experimentally the hypothesis that the motivation driving an action is relevant for its perceived kindness and, as a consequence, for reciprocal behavior. In...

This paper proposes a new method for the measurement of the quality of relational life. Building on the recent literature on the determinants of subjective well-being, we use implicit valuations estimated from microeconometric life satisfaction equations to weigh scores on several dimensions of...

This paper investigates the increase in the relative demand for nonmanual workers using a large panel of Italian manufacturing firms over the 1990s. The results indicate that "within-firm" skill upgrading was the main determinant of this increase, with hightech firms playing a leading role in...