In Italy, employment in waste collection has been widely used to reduce unemployment and create political consensus (especially in the South). Having secure jobs allows people to achieve income stability. But, income is just a means to an end and the goods and services or ‘commodities’ it...

In the recent discussion on productivity and how to foster it, the role of wage dispersion as determinant of workers productivity attracted much attention. But, what are the determinant of wage dispersion? In this paper, we analyze a very specific determinant of wage dispersion: job-to-job labor...

Poverty and informal employment are often regarded as correlated phenomena. Many empirical studies have shown that informal employment has a causal impact on household poverty, mainly through low wages. Yet other studies focus on the reverse causality from poverty to informality, arising from a...

The typical ingredients of energy reforms in the European Union (EU) in the 1990s were full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration and liberalization. This paper analyses the effects of energy reforms on the probability of households experiencing deprivation, defined as difficulty in...

Electoral punishment is the main instrument that citizens have to keep government accountable, answerable and accessible to the people they serve. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate whether individual social resources - social capital and religious resources - may enhance the...