In Italy employees are fully insured against earning losses due to illness. Since worker’s health is not easily verifiable, absenteeism due to illness is considered an empirical proxy for employee shirking. The Bank of Italy Household Survey (SHIW) provides individual data on days of absence....

A large body of literature considers the advantages of using informal networks to match workers to jobs. However, family ties may interfere with a genuine process of worker selection, favoring people with connections over more talented workers. We offer a simple model of favoritism to explain...

Abstract: Using a panel data model to control for differences in regional technological levels and to take into account endogeneity, we find two key results for the growth of Italian regions. Firstly, we show that the rate of conditional convergence of each region is much higher (from 12% to 18%...

In this paper we investigate the effects of class size on the achievements of a sample of college students enrolled at a middle-sized Italian public university. To estimate the effects of class size we exploit the exogenous variations in class size determined by a maximum class size rule...

In 1990 a reform in Italy has modified the employment protection legislation for employees of small firms (with fewer than 16 employees) making much more costly for firms to dismiss workers, while leaving unchanged the employment protection in large firms. Using a sample of administrative data...

This paper evaluates the relative contribution of factor accumulation and technology in explaining output per worker differences across Italian regions in the period 2000-2004. The contributions of physical and human capital are separately estimated through the variance decomposition of output...

Many incentive contracts are based on subjective evaluations and contractual disputes depend on judges’ decisions. However, subjective evaluations raise risks of favouritism and distortions. Sport contests are a fruitful field for testing empirically theories of incentives. In this paper the...

We investigate whether Italian regions have converged in terms of output per worker because of physical capital accumulation, human capital accumulation or thanks to technological catch-up. In order to identify channels of convergence we adopt the methodology recently proposed by Wong (2007) and...

A number of papers considers the use of informal networks (the help of relatives, friends and acquaintances) to find an employment as an efficient mechanism to match workers to jobs. However, evidence in Italy shows that informal networks tend to be used more in less productive jobs and less...

By casual empiricism, it seems that many firms take explicit account of the family ties connecting workers, often hiring individuals belonging to the same family or passing jobs on from parents to their children. This paper makes an attempt to explain this behaviour by introducing the assumption...