It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specific effects focusing on within-country...

This paper analyzes the impact of downward wage rigidity on the labor market. It shows that imposing downward wage rigidity in a matching model with cyclical fluctuations in productivity, endogenous match-destruction, and on-the-job search, quits are procyclical and layoffs countercyclical. It...

In standard equilibrium search models with strategic wage bargaining and on-the-job search, renegotiation is permitted without requirement of a credible threat. Workers trigger renegotiation whenever they have a new outside option that could raise their wages. In this note I modify the model to...

The paper investigates the costs of waste disposal and recycling services by using a well-behaved Composite cost function model. Our estimates on a unique sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities highlight that the refuse collection technology exhibits constant returns to scale as well as...

This paper investigates the determinants of board compensation for a sample of Italian State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). To that purpose, we use a newly collected panel data of 106 local public utilities observed form 1994 through 2004, which includes detailed information on the boards of...

This paper explores the link between accountability, corruption and efficiency in the context of a career concern model where politically con- nected local monopolies are in charge of the provision of a local public service. We fi?nd that both corruption and a low degree of accountabil- ity...

We use twenty years of Italian administrative panel data, a uniquely rich source of information on internal migration experiences, to identify the role of unobserved worker characteristics in the selection and returns to migrants. We propose and implement a novel iterative estimation method for...

We propose a simple test that uses information on workers’ mobility, wages and firms’ profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers...

We present a partnership model where heterogeneous agents bargain over the gains from trade and search on the match. Frictions allow agents to extract higher rents from more productive partners, generating an endogenous preference for high types. More productive agents upgrade their partners...

This paper deals with the open issue about the choice between a centralized versus a decentralized public procurement strategy. Using a unique dataset on tender prices of selected drugs for hospital usage awarded by a sample of 52 Italian local health service providers (ASLs) between 2009 and...