Purpose: Youth unemployment is one of the major problems that the economic systems face. Given this issue, the purpose of this paper is to assess whether school-to-work transition is easier for individuals with secondary vocational education compared to general secondary education. The authors...

Purpose – This paper investigates whether the effect of unemployment benefits (UB) on unemployment duration is the same for individuals belonging to different wealth groups. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of newly unemployed individuals from Italy in 2007, we perform...

Purpose – This paper investigates whether the effect of unemployment benefits (UB) on unemployment duration is the same for individuals belonging to different wealth groups. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of newly unemployed individuals from Italy in 2007, we perform...

We examine how unemployment schemes and liquidity constraints affect re-employment probabilities trying to assess whether these schemes, through employment services and search requirements, can offset the perverse effect of benefits on unemployment duration. Similarly, given that liquidity...

The authors provide a theoretical framework to model the workers' choice problem of opting among different pension schemes, a choice problem that is common to several countries that have reformed their social security system in the last decades. This process is currently affecting private sector...

This article investigates empirically the relationship between international trade (in particular with non-OECD countries) and wage differentials of workers with different skills. We examine years from 1996 to 2005 in several countries and, whereas past studies (using data from previous years)...

The authors study the evolution of the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Italy from 1977 to 2004. In this period, the differentials do not show a clear trend (apart for a feeble increasing trend in the very last years) and they fluctuate around a fairly stable mean....

Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...