The paper analyzes the relationship between barriers to entry and employment in the Italian retail trade sector. In Italy the opening of large outlets is regulated at the regional level. By using differences-in-differences estimators I study the effects of the rules implemented in Abruzzo and...

The fall in employment and the increase in unemployment rates in Italy in 2009 were fairly modest, given the sharp drop in GDP and compared with the recession of the early 1990s. This work shows that these data should be interpreted with caution, however. Firstly, employment trends as measured...

The sovereign debt crisis led to financial difficulties for European firms and a decline in the use of labour input. We use qualitative firm-level data for 24 European countries, collected within the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN3) of the ESCB, to propose a cross-country analysis...