Workplace Training Unpacked: Labor Market Competition and Investment in General Skills

joint with Manfredi Aliberti

SSRN version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5006121

Skills acquired on the job, whether general or specific, significantly influence workers' labor market outcomes. Workers with general skills tend to have higher re-employment prospects and greater resilience to economic shocks. Using novel data from two different policy interventions in the Italian labor market, we develop a new measure that captures the generality of the tasks taught in firm-provided training for individual workers. This measure enables us to examine the relationship between labor market competition and the nature of firms' human capital investment. Our findings indicate that, as theory predicts, workers in more competitive labor markets receive less general training.

When Antitrust Bites: the Effect of Antitrust Enforcement on Transaction Prices

joint with Chiara Fumagalli, Massimo Motta and Emanuele Tarantino

This paper examines how antitrust enforcement design affects merger outcomes by exploiting the quasi-exogenous variation generated by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act reform of 2000. Using comprehensive data on US mergers from 1994 to 2011, we find that relaxing enforcement increases both merger profitability and industry-level concentration. At the firm level, merging entities in a low-enforcement environment reduce their size relative to similar firms under stricter scrutiny. We develop a tractable theoretical framework based on a Cournot model that demonstrates how remedies are the key mechanism driving these observed effects. Our results show that when authorities approve only efficiency-generating mergers, average profitability may exceed that of unregulated mergers, but when remedies are included in the enforcement toolkit, this relationship reverses as enforcement reduces post-merger profits by constraining market power.

Global ECO-Cities: Pursuing the Utopia of Sustainable Globalization

IAI Commentaries: https://www.iai.it/it/pubblicazioni/c05/global-eco-cities-pursuing-utopia-sustainable-urbanisation