This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions (LMI) on business cycle (BC) synchronization. The authors first develop a two-country right-to-manage model of wage bargaining. They find that, following a symmetric demand change, cross-country differences in LMI generate divergent...

The paper investigates the international GDP synchronization within the international real business cycle framework (Backus, Kehoe and Kydland, 1992). It sheds new light on the comovement issue by highlighting the role of cross-country divergence in labor market institutions (LMIs). We first...

This paper examines the empirical link between labor market institutions and international business cycle synchronization. Using a data panel of 20 OECD countries over the 1964-2003 period, we evaluate how cross-country labor market heterogeneity affects business cycle comovement. Our estimation...

A matching theory approach is utilised to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the 1997 legge Treu, which considerably eased the regulation of temporary work and favoured its growth in Italy. The authors re-parameterise the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

This paper provides new evidence on the institutional determinants of firm size. Using a comprehensive longitudinal database of firm characteristics across 29 industrial sectors in 15 OECD countries, the authors study how labor regulations and barriers to entrepreneurship affect industrial...

The authors formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. They explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which...

The authors study the effects of liquidity constraints and start-up costs on the relationship between wealth and the fraction of entrepreneurs in an economy. They develop a dynamic occupational choice model with endogenous wealth and entry into entrepreneurship. The model predicts that, with...

This paper uses a calibrated life cycle model to quantify the distributional effects of Social Security reforms. The authors focus on two countries, Italy and France, because they adopted two different strategies to cope with aging. While France marginally modified its defined benefit pension...