The liberalization of fixed term contracts in Europe has led to a two tier regime, with a growing share of jobs covered by temporary contracts. The paper proposes a matching model with direct search in which temporary and permanent jobs coexist in a long run equilibrium. When temporary contracts...

We use a unique data set providing administrative information on earnings by skill-level (blue collars, white collars), on the local stock of human capital and on several firm’s characteristics, including balance sheet data, to investigate the size of localized human capital externalities in...

This paper studies gender wage differentials in Italy by providing a structural estimation of the frictional parameters of two different theoretical specifications of an equilibrium search model. I alternatively allow for firm heterogeneity and discrimination empirically using maximum likelihood...

There is growing interest in the analysis and measurement of social exclusion, to complement the static and dynamic literature on income poverty. On theoretical grounds, social exclusion and income poverty are seen as different processes, but with closely interrelated dynamics. However, our...

In this paper I question the hypothesis of full rationality in the context of job changing behaviour, via simple econometric explorations on microdata drawn from WHIP (Worker Histories Italian Panel). Workers’ performance is compared at the end of a three-year time window that starts when...

We investigate the effects of income support on unemployment and welfare dynamics when stigma is attached to welfare provision. Stigma has been modelled in the literature as a cost of entry into welfare. Allowing for psychological factors, we assume that with stigma welfare provision leads to...

This paper studies how different behavioural norms affect individual and social welfare in a population with heterogeneous preferences. I assume preferences are private information, and that interactions between individuals do not involve communication, nor bargaining. I first compare two...

In this paper we document a common sense idea: When an individual is searching for a new job, the longer it takes the more s/he will be available to adapt her/his skills, often with a worsening in status and/or wage. We used a dataset of administrative source, containing a sample of individuals'...

We study financial markets in which both rational and overconfident agents coexist and make endogenous information acquisition decisions. We demonstrate the following irrele- vance result: when a positive fraction of rational agents (endogenously) decides to become informed in equilibrium,...