A large part of the Italian welfare system is designed and implemented at the very local level, leading to a high degree of heterogeneity in the type and the generosity of available programs across the country. As a consequence, studies of welfare use based on standard household surveys may fail...

Purpose – The authors aim to investigate public‐private pay determination using French, British and Italian micro data from the 2001 ECHP (European Community Household Panel) and estimate public/private wage differentials by country. By focussing on different countries, they exploit...

The estimation of economic average returns to education is subject to a number of well-known econometric problems. The first is the so-called ‘ability bias’, responsible for the ‘endogeneity’ of education in earnings equations. The second is the so-called ‘return bias’, due to...

This paper uses longitudinal data for a sample of Italian firms to study the effects of technological and organisational changes on wage levels and on wage differentials by skills inside the firm. Fixed effect estimates reveal that technological changes are associated with higher absolute and...