This paper aims to examine to what extent a "ladder" e.ect may contribute to explain changes in unemployment in Spain. The "ladder" e.ect arises when highly-skilled workers who do not find a job that matches their skills, accept jobs that were previously occupied by less qualified staff. We...

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

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. We re-parameterise the matching function as a Beveridge Curve and estimate it as a...

This paper investigates the importance that market regulation and financial imperfections have in firm size. We analyse institutions affecting labour market as Employment Protection Laws (EPL) and Product Market Regulation (PMR). Moreover, we study the effects of these institutions on firm...

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...

This paper investigates the sources of business cycle comovement within the New Open Economy Macroeconomy framework. It sheds new light on the business cycle comovement issue by examining the role of cross-country divergence in labor market institutions. The authors first document stylized facts...

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 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...