This paper investigates the effect of the lockdown on COVID-19 infections. After the 22nd of March 2020, the Italian government shut down many economic activities to limit the contagion. Sectors deemed essentials for the economy were, however, allowed to remain active. We exploit the...

We investigate how the flexibility of temporary contracts affects the probability of young workers to be upgraded into permanent employment. Theoretically, we explore the workers' career development in response to the change in flexibility within a search and matching model; empirically, we...

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy...

In the US almost 3 per cent of employees are absent from their job for reasons other than vacation, but are still technically employed. We argue that firms may find optimal to use temporary replacement workers to fill these vacant positions. We set up a matching model with directed search and...

A large body of empirical literature indicates that, contrary to predictions from economic theory, wages in the informal sector increase after any minimum wage hike. This phenomenon was so far explained as a byproduct of a signal conveyed by statutory minimum wages to wage setting in the...

The recent financial crises, alongside a dramatic rise in unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic, suggest that financial shocks do translate into the labor markets. In this paper we first document that financial recessions amplify labor market volatility and Okun's elasticity over the...

Dismissal disputes occur mostly in recessions and often lead to long and costly contract termination procedures. This paper investigates how dispute procedures may affect the job-matching process. First we present a simple accounting frame- work that corresponds with general dismissal...

The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. Using US microdata, we show that the education bias also holds within industries and in two thirds of 3-digit occupations. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model of private and public employment based on two features....

We propose a simple theory of under- and over-employment. Individuals of high type can perform both skilled and unskilled jobs, but only a fraction of low-type workers can perform skilled jobs. People have different non-pecuniary values over these jobs, akin to a Roy model. We calibrate two...

All OECD countries have either legally mandated severance pay or compensations imposed by industry-level bargaining in case of employer initiated job separations. According to the extensive literature on Employment Protection Legislation such transfers are either ineffective or highly...