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...

In this paper I provide estimates of the impact of immigration on native wage and employment levels (rather than on wage inequality which has been the focus of the literature). I use variation within 2-digit industries across regions using Austrian panel data from 1986 to 2004 for...

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...

In this paper I review the main strengths and weaknesses of agent-based computational models. In particular I rationalise the main theoretical critiques, which point to the following problematic areas: (i) interpretation of the simulation dynamics, (ii) estimation of the simulation model, and...

Administrative data from INPS (Italian Institute for Social Security) on Italian high tenure workers job-histories (15 years, from 1985 to 1999) is used to quantify the temporal pattern of the effect of displacement on workers’ earnings, employment and wages. Moreover, I distinguish different...

Earnings differentials between men and women have experienced a stable convergence during the 1980s, following a process started in the late 1970s. However, in the 1990s the convergence has almost stopped. The first objective of the paper is to evaluate if discrimination, defined as explicit...