We assess the impact of low-skilled immigration on capital intensity. We first present a model characterized by frictions in the labor market and firms' asymmetric information on workers' skills and show that firms can react to the immigration-induced reduction of their workforce's skill level...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialized countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this well-known fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by the immigrants) or to an...

In Italy, Patti Territoriali (Territorial Pacts) are one of the main government-sponsored programmes to foster growth in disadvantaged areas. A territorial pact is an agreement among the local authorities and representatives of civil society (mainly entrepreneurs and trade unions) of a number of...

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between individual skills and labour market performance of immigrants residing in Lombardy during the period 2001-2005. We use a recent dataset collected by the NGO ISMU, which includes information on individual characteristics and the legal...

We present a model of industrial location and endogenous growth with congestion costs. According to the interplay between knowledge spillovers and commuting costs, we are able to obtain both a Krugman-type and a bell-shaped agglomeration outcome. In the first case, the economy experiences a...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialised countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by immigrants) or to an involuntary process...

The paper consider the skill-biased "share-altering" technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where skilled and unskilled individual may exhibit different preferences for local amenities. A main novelty - both for labour and urban economics- is that, under this...

This paper considers the "share-altering" technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where individuals have different levels of skills. Building on a simple Cobb-Douglas production function, our model shows that the implementation of skill-biased technologies requires a...