Below I list old papers (either presented at workshops, seminars and conferences or published in working paper series) on which I'm no longer working. If you are interested I can send a copy.


Evidence on the relationship between labor cost and price dynamics from Italian firm-level data, (with F. Venditti), 2009.
We draw on a large survey of Italian manufacturing firms and on their balance sheets to document the firm-level association between price and labor cost changes over the period 1988-2006. In particular, the data provide information on the actual size of annual price variations and allow to measure precisely the labor input in terms of total hours. We estimate a very low unconditional elasticity of prices to hourly labor cost, in the order of 0.02-0.03; about half of this estimate can be accounted for by common factors affecting equally all firms in a given year. The result is extremely robust to detailed controls for demand and productivity shocks, in particular contemporaneous real sales changes, per-capita hours and a comprehensive index of capacity utilization rates. We find that price changes are correlated only with contemporaneous labor cost changes. We exploit firm-specific information on expected developments in own sales, prices and employment levels to show that our estimates do not reflect reverse causality whereby wages increase in response to anticipated developments in business activity. Overall, the available evidence suggests that contemporaneous idiosyncratic hourly labor cost developments are only weakly associated to changes in relative prices of Italian manufacturing firms.

Unequal workers or unequal firms? (with A. Brandolini and P. Cipollone), 2004.
We investigate the importance of firm characteristics for the Italian earnings distribution by exploiting an extensive matched firm-employee dataset covering the period 1980-1997. The dataset includes detailed information on a representative sample of about 1,500 firms along with detailed information on wages, weeks worked and personal characteristics of individuals employed at any of the sampled firms. We estimate firm-year specific wage equations to assess the degree of heterogeneity in wage schedules across firms and over time. We then decompose the observed change in earnings dispersion in the component due to changes in the distribution of individual characteristics and that due to changes in the distribution of prices, namely the firm-year specific returns to observed individual characteristics. We further compare this decomposition with one based on estimation of a year-specific wage equation common to all firms, as is commonly done in most studies on inequality. Our exercise suggests that price heterogeneity matters in explaining the evolution of earnings inequality at least as much as the change in the distribution of individual characteristics.

The consequences of job displacement in Italy, 2003.
The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent Italian wages suffer from job separation. We use Italian Social Security records to obtain a detailed sample of private non agricultural employees' working histories and compensations. Our results show that workers separating from an employer experience a wage drop both before displacement and upon reemployment. This pattern is very similar to the existing evidence for the US and it is more pronounced for workers exiting for some time from employment after displacement. We find some evidence of a negative relationship between job tenure prior to separation and the permanent loss suffered by a displaced worker. On the contrary, general human capital does not seem to affect the estimated pattern of earnings losses. Workers experiencing some non employment only partly recover the wage loss suffered upon reemployment: after four years from separation they still earn systematically less than similar non displaced workers.

The investment decisions of small and large Italian manufacturing firms (with R. Torrini), 2001.
We study the investment decision of Italian manufacturing firms using balance sheet data for the period 1982-1998. Investment choices turn out to be strongly affected by financial conditions as summarized by firm's current liquidity and a measure of theu ser cost of capital. Small firms respond more to the dynamics of the cost of capital and become even more sensitive to interest rates in a recession. We also find that interest rates are more relevant in more capital intensive sectors. We find evidence that the investment decision is highly asymmetric: firms react much more to a demand increase than to a demand drop. When demand falls they simply stop investing. For small firms this asymmetry turns out to be even larger. This behaviour can explain the remarkable procyclicality of the standard deviation of capital growth rates. We also find evidence of persistence in investment decisions: firms who invest at low rates today are more likely to invest at a low pace in the future. Small firms and those with a higher degree of capital per worker are more likely to accumulate capital slowly; firms exporting a higher share of their output are more likely to be fast investors.


The effects of unemployment spells on subsequent wages in Spain (with G. Saint-Paul), 1998.
We estimate the wage loss from unemployment in Spain and see how it is affected by previous unemployment experience, unemployment duration, eligibility for unemployment benefits, and previous wages. We also study its variations across groups. Our main conclusion is that while there is some evidence that labour market rigidities tend to lower it, the wage loss of displaced workers is remarkably high: more than 30%, that is, twice the equivalent figure for the US and France. Wages in Spain suffer from a serious mismeasurement problems that we do our best to control, so that our results are less robust than the ones that would be obtained with better data sets. However, they indicate a large level of wage flexibility in Spain.