In this paper we study the evolution of the Italian wage inequality, and of its determinants, using two decades of matched employer-employee data covering the entire population of private-sector workers and firms in the Veneto region. We find that wage inequality has increased since the...

It is widely believed that rent-sharing reduces the incentives for investment when long term contracts are infeasible because some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. We propose a simple test for the degree of hold-up based on the fraction of capital costs that are deducted...

Over the last decade, several countries have followed the Norwegian example and introduced laws mandating gender quota for corporate board membership. The main aim of these laws is breaking the "glass ceiling" which prevents women from advancing into top corporate positions. In this paper, we...

We measure the impact of employment protection reduction in an uncertain framework on firms' hires and performance, exploiting the Italian 2015 Jobs Act. Results indicate that firms (1) stabilize workforce mainly through contract transformations of low-tenure and low-human-capital incumbent...

Two decades of unsuccessful marginal labour market reforms provided the political support to reduce the flexibility gap between temporary and open-ended workers by means of a retrenchment of the employment protection benefitting the latter. To support employment levels during the crisis years,...

Liberalization of temporary contracts has been a hallmark of labor market reforms during the last decades. More recently, factors like the sovereign debt crisis pushed the most indebted countries to unprecedented reductions of employment protection legislation (EPL) also on open-ended contracts....

Using three waves of a uniquely rich survey on Italian private firms, we explore the impact of female managers on the use of part-time work. Building on a literature arguing that female leaders are more sensitive to their employees' needs and more self-transcendent than their male counterparts,...

This paper explores the link between the presence of unions in the workplace, the adoption of decentralized labor agreements and technical efficiency, using a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We apply the Data Envelopment Analysis, and its robust version based on bootstrap theory, to...

We propose a simple test that uses information on workers' mobility, wages and firms' profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers are...

We propose a novel methodology to uncover the sorting pattern in the labor market. Our methodology exploits the additional information contained in profits, which complements the information from wages and transitions typically used in previous work. We identify the strength of sorting solely...