Giving Voice to Employees and Spreading Information within the Firm: the Manner Matters

Economists are paying increasing attention to “factors” in job satisfaction. Job satisfaction can affect productivity, effort, absenteeism, and quits. This paper analyzes data from the “Working in Britain, 2000” questionnaire; the results confirm the effects of individual features on job satisfaction, as highlighted in previous studies. The analysis shows that job satisfaction can be enhanced by spreading information within the organization and by giving voice to employees, but the management must choose communication strategies perceived as reliable by the employees.Human Resource Management,Job satisfaction,gift exchange,employees’ voice,procedural utility

On the Substitutability between Equal Opportunities and Income Redistribution

This paper investigates the supposed substitutability between equal opportunities and public redistribution. In the first part a theory which finds a substitutability between redistribution and equal chances in determining the extent of incomes inequality (Gini Index) is presented. This result is obtained including inequality of opportunities in the labor market, and preferences for leisure in the individual utility function. The model suggests that an optimal level of universalistic redistribution (maximizing average utility) exists, which is increasing with respect to inequality of opportunities. The subsequent empirical exercises offer a plausible measure of meritocracy, besides being a support for the validity of the theoretical model. Moreover, the empirical analysis suggests that there could be countries which should enhance redistribution and others which should reduce it, given their level of opportunities inequality.Universalism,Redistribution,Inequality,Meritocracy,Taxation

Financial cycles, credit networks and macroeconomic fluctuations: multi-scale stochastic models and wavelet analysis

This project focuses on the macroeconomics of financial cycles. Usually defined in terms of self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by bust, the recent empirical literature has recurred to two approaches \u2013 turning point analysis and frequency-based filters - applied to measures of credit and asset prices to pose a number of stylized facts. First, financial cycles tend to display a greater amplitude and a lower frequency in comparison to business cycles, with peaks associated with systemic crises. Second, financial cycles depend on policy regimes and on the pace of financial innovations, leading to a wide cross-country heterogeneity and a time-varying degree of global synchronization. The latter point is clearly related to the structural transformations occurred in financial systems over the last three decades, like the cumulative integration of traditional banking with capital market developments and the increasing degree of interconnections among financial institutions. However, to date very little is known about determinants and mechanisms behind financial cycles, and on how they interact with business cycles and medium-to-long-run macroeconomic performance. In this project we plan to research along three dimensions: i) measurement issues, in order to provide a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of co-movements between financial and real variables across a sample of financial developed countries, both over time and at different frequencies; ii) theoretical issues, aimed at exploring under what circumstances the network of interconnections among financial intermediaries and between intermediaries and non-financial borrowers might evolve cyclically, contributing this way to regulate the incentives agents have in taking risks, and to set the importance of credit and financial frictions in accounting for time-varying misallocations of resources; iii) policy issues, given the role assigned by international supervisory bodies to a proper characterization and knowledge of the financial cycle as a prerequisite for the macro-prudential regulation of banks, and the scope of monetary policy in promoting financial stability in addition to the typical mandate of price stability. Our task requires the employment of a new approach to macroeconomic analysis, diverse analytical tools and one unifying economic principle. As regards the latter, our focal point is the notion of risk externalities, across financial institutions and between the financial sector and the real economy. The set of tools we plan to employ spans from wavelets methods to multi-scale models in continuous time, and from strategic network formation to agent-based computational techniques. All these tools are instrumental in building and estimating macroeconomic models characterized by interrelated markets operating at different time scales

The relationships between GDP growth, energy consumption, renewable energy production and CO2 emissions in European transition economies

The objective of the analysis is to study the relationships between GDP, energy consumption, renewable energy production, and CO2 emissions in some European transition economies in the period 1990-2018. We use the growth rates of per capita values, in a panel VAR approach where all variables are typically treated as endogenous, allowing some inference on the causality of the relationships. The decision to focus on European transition countries is motivated by the fact that a significant part of the future of the green economy in Europe depends on the environmental and energy policies that will be implemented by these countries. In the transition economies (and years) included in the analysis, our findings suggest that investing in energy efficiency is good for the competitiveness of economies (in terms of effects on GDP growth) and is good for the environment (in terms of diminishing CO2 emissions). Finally, an increasing production of renewable energies reduces CO2 emissions

Evolución económica comparada entre Brasil y Argentina

Fil: Valentini, Enzo Emiliano. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas

Economia irregolare, criminalit\ue0 e disuguaglianza dei redditi: un circolo vizioso?

Questo lavoro analizza il possibile legame in Italia tra la disuguaglianza dei redditi e il livello di illegalit\ue0 presente in due ambiti della vita sociale ed economica (omicidi e lavoro irregolare). I risultati di un\u2019analisi econometrica a livello regionale mostrano che la presenza di lavoro irregolare e di un elevato tasso di omicidi \ue8 responsabile di una diminuzione complessiva del reddito, particolarmente pronunciata per i redditi bassi, con inevitabile aumento della disuguaglianza

Once NEET, always NEET? A synthetic panel approach to analyze the Moroccan labor market

In many regions of the world, the persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are currently not in employment, education, or training is of global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30 percent of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 24 are currently not in employment, education, or training. Drawing from various rounds of Moroccan labor force surveys, this paper contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of labor markets in developing countries. First, it identifies the socioeconomic determinants of Morocco's young population not in employment, education, or training. Second, employing a synthetic panel methodology in the context of labor market analysis, the paper describes how the conditions of individuals in this group has changed over time. One striking, and worrisome, pattern that emerges from the 2010 synthetic panel data is that, even after 10 years, a majority of the young population not in employment, education, or training remained outside the labor marketor education, with very little chance of moving out of their situation. Their chronic stagnancy confirms the powerful effect that initial conditions have on determining young people's future outcomes

Does gender equality in labor participation bring real equality? Evidence from developed and developing countries

Drawing on various macro- and micro-data sources, the authors present robust evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and inequality. Overall, female labor force participation is found to have a strong and significant dis-equalizing impact in at least three groups of developing countries with relatively low initial levels of participation. A decile-level analysis shows that female labor force participation has higher levels of returns among top deciles compared with the lower deciles in the developing countries analyzed. This evidence focuses attention on the importance of developing policies specifically targeting women in lower deciles of the income distribution

Disuguaglianze di genere in una pandemia: un approccio economico

L’evidenza empirica più recente indica che le diseguaglianze di genere durante la pandemia da Covid-19 si sono accentuate. Questo lavoro, dopo aver esposto la concettualizzazione e la misurazione delle diseguaglianze di genere, esamina i principali meccanismi economici e comportamentali che, portando a una maggiore diseguaglianza, in seguito alla pandemia rischiano di azzerare i diritti faticosamente conquistati dalle donne.The latest empirical evidence shows that gender inequalities have been increasing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Starting from how inequalities are defined and measured, this paper addresses the issue of economic and social mechanisms which – by increasing gender inequalities, after the pandemic – are likely to jeopardize many of the rights conquered by women