We show that in the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden women whose first child is a boy are less likely to work in a typical week and work fewer hours than women with first-born girls. The puzzle is why women in these countries react in this way to the sex of their first child, which is chosen...

The interest for household production has grown since the release of the new System of National Accounts in 2008. In this paper we analyse how accounting for own-use production may affect labour statistics. Traditional headcount ratios may not be very informative when employment rates consider...

This analysis aims at studying joblessness and the effect of the economic crisis at the household rather than the individual level. With respect to the main European countries, in Italy the jobless household rate is lower because of the larger household size (the more adults present the lower...

The 1998 reform of the Italian retail trade sector delegated to the regional governments the regulation of entry of large retail shops. We use the local variation in regulation to determine the effects of entry barriers on firm performance for a representative sample of medium and large retail...

Following the two surveys carried out in 2007 and 2009 on firms' price and wage setting practices, in June 2013 the ESCB's Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) conducted a third survey aimed at assessing, through a harmonised questionnaire, the most important transformations under way in the national...

We propose a structural model of two-sided matching and a semi-parametric procedure for its estimation that allow to analyze determinants of managers' compensation such as firm's and manager's quality, production technology, bargaining power and inter-temporal preferences. We use the estimated...