Francesco Devicienti

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche

People’s attitudes about how paid and unpaid work should be divided between the members of a couple determine gendered socioeconomic outcomes to a great extent. It is thus important to understand how gender role attitudes (GRA) are formed and evolve. This article concentrates on a path-breaking event in life: becoming a parent. Using longitudinal d...

In this paper, we investigate how the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship varies between sons and daughters and whether such a process depends on living in a country characterized by a high gender gap. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe data set, we find that the effect on daughters' entrepreneurial choices...

The literature evaluating the impact of gender quotas in the firm's governing bodies has not yet come to an established consensus on their effects on corporate performance. We contribute to the literature by exploiting firm level data to assess whether the reform that introduced a gender-balancing quota on the boards of directors of Italian listed...

Si analizza la relazione che lega il ruolo della contrattazione integrativa, la presenza del sindacato e l’investimento in formazione professionale nei luoghi di lavoro. Al fine di illustrare tali meccanismi, la ricerca applica una strategia di analisi mista che integra dati campionari di impresa e dati qualitativi derivanti da interviste a testimo...

This paper uses firm-level data and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods to investigate the effects of participation in formal networking activities and of female representation in leadership positions on firm’s economic efficiency. Our findings show that firms belonging to a network have a higher level of technical efficiency (i.e., the positio...

Using a large sample of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we investigate the effect of business cooperation realized through a “network contract” on the economic performance of network members. We find that establishing a formal business network has a positive effect on a firm’s gross margin ratio and exports, but not on profits. T...

This paper investigates the costs for firms of employing women full-time versus part-time, in terms of differential hourly wages. To this end, we use administrative matched employer-employee data on the universe of female workers in Italy over a period of 33 years and rely on regression models that control for worker, firm, and job match fixed effe...

Using three waves of a representative survey of Italian private firms, the authors explore the impact of female managers on a firm’s use of part-time work. Building on a literature that suggests female leaders display relatively more altruistic values compared to their male counterparts, the authors assess whether these differences manifest themsel...

Italian male wage inequality has increased at a relatively fast pace from the mid‐1980s until the early 2000s, while it has been persistently flat since then. We analyse this trend, focusing on the period of most rapid growth in pay dispersion. By accounting for worker and firm fixed effects, it is shown that workers' heterogeneity has been a major...

We propose a novel methodology to uncover the sorting pattern in labor markets. We identify the strength of sorting solely from a ranking of firms by profits. To discern the sign of sorting, we build a noisy ranking of workers from wage data. Our test for the sign of sorting is consistent even with noisy worker rankings. We apply our approach to a...

In this article, we explore the impact of part-time work on firm productivity. Using a large panel data set of Italian corporations for the period 2000-2010, we first estimate firms' yearly productivity by removing the output contribution of the labor and capital inputs aggregates. We use different approaches aimed at solving input simultaneity, in...

This article investigates the effect of workplace unionization and product market volatility on firms’ propensity to use temporary employment. Using Italian firm-level data, the authors show that volatility has a positive impact on the share of temporary contracts. The baseline estimates for the impact of unions are inconclusive, but a clear patter...

This paper explores the link between the presence of unions in the workplace, the adoption of decentralized labor agreements and technical efficiency, using a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We apply the Data Envelopment Analysis, and its robust version based on bootstrap theory, to get reliable estimates of technical efficiency at the...

Attitudes of women and men about how paid and unpaid work should be divided in the couple largely determine women's earnings and career prospects. Hence, it is important to understand how people's gender role attitudes are formed and evolve over the lifetime. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most path-breaking events in life: becoming a...

That human capital reduces inequality and increases productivity is a well-established result. Both links depend on the mix of human capital that individuals accumulate, i.e. on whether it is more specific or general. This paper fills a gap in the literature trying to measure whether workers accumulate disproportionally more general human capital t...

This article estimates poverty persistence over an individual's lifetime, using two definitions: income poverty and a multidimensional index of lifestyle deprivation. We stress the ability of the two definitions to provide a generally consistent characterization of poverty persistence risks faced by various population subgroups, but also the additi...

This paper investigates the effect of workplace unionization and product market volatility on firms' propensity to use temporary employment. Using Italian firm level data, we show that unionization and volatility have a positive impact on the share of temporary contracts. However, as volatility increases the union effect becomes negative, suggestin...

This note analyses the effect of parental income variability on investments in education when capital markets are imperfect. Our empirical results show that educational choices might act as a buffer choice when the environment is uncertain.

We propose a 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 are more (less) likely to move to better firms than bad workers. As...

Purpose This paper seeks to explore whether temporary jobs are a port of entry into permanent employment and to argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered. Design/methodology/approach The paper bases its empirical evidence on a longitudinal sample of labour market entrants in Italy and estimates dyn...

Rent-sharing by workers can reduce the incentives for investment if some of the returns to sunk capital are captured in higher wages. We propose a simple measure of this “holdup” effect based on the size of the wage offset for firm-specific capital accumulation. Using Social Security earnings records for workers in the Veneto region of Italy linked...

Poverty and informal employment are often regarded as correlated phenomena. Many empirical studies have shown that informal employment has a causal impact on household poverty, mainly through low wages. Yet other studies focus on the reverse causality from poverty to informality, arising from a range of constraints that poverty poses to jobholders....

We show that the Italian wage curve, inexistent in the eighties and early nineties, has reemerged after the 1993 Income Policy Agreement, owing to the greater role granted to flexible and locally bargained top-up wage components.

This note shows how the Shapley-value can be applied to the regression-based methods that are often used to decompose changes in wage distributions. The method remedies the path-dependency exhibited by existing approaches that compute the contributions due to (i) changes in sample observable characteristics, (ii) changes in the return of characteri...

Are temporary jobs a port of entry into permanent employment? In this paper we argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered, as the different contracts observed in practice are typically characterized by varying combinations of training, tax-incentives and EPL provisions. We base our empirical evidence...

Using the 1985–99 WHIP data, we find a sizable amount of downward wage rigidity in Italy, with a prevalence of real over nominal rigidity. The results hold when real rigidity is identified either with reference to collective bargaining dispositions or to price inflation. Consistently with the labour market reforms of the early 1990s, downward rigid...

There is growing interest in the analysis and measurement of social exclusion, to complement the static and dynamic literature on income poverty. On theoretical grounds, social exclusion and income poverty are seen as different processes, but with closely interrelated dynamics. However, our empirical understanding of the way these two processes dyn...

We use a 1998 - 2004 sample from WHIP in order to study the labor market transitions of young entrants. We consider seven labor market tates: permanent and temporary employment, apprenticeship, training pogrammes, self employment, quasi subordinate jobs and unemployment. After controlling for individual ?xed e¤ects in a dynamic multinomial logit fr...

This article studies the dynamics and persistence of poverty in Italy during the nineties, using the ECHP, 1994-2001. Various definitions of poverty are analyzed in parallel, income poverty, subjective poverty and a multidimensional index of life-style deprivation. For each poverty definition, the hazard rates of leaving poverty and re-entering int...

This paper analyses the changes in the Italian wage distribution from 1985 to 1999, using the Worker History Italian Panel (WHIP). The rise in wage inequality is first documented using various statistical indicators. Standard decompositions of inequality indices by population subgroups shed light on the underlying causes of the observed distributio...

revised version available as working paper n. 52

This paper estimates the extent of downward wage rigidity in Italy using a micro-econometric model and the recently released WHIP longitudinal data. The econometric approach distinguishes between downward nominal wage rigidity – i.e., the impediment to nominal wage cuts – and downward real wage rigidity – i.e., when nominal wages cannot grow by les...

Questo articolo stima le probabilità di entrare e uscire dallo stato di povertà (poverty dynamics) e la sua persistenza in Italia negli anni ‘90, attingendo dalle fonti longitudinali dello European Community Household Panel, 1994-2001. Combinando le stime dei tassi di uscita con quelli di rientro, l’articolo propone una misura di persistenza che ti...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro-data from the Social Security Institute (INPS) to estimate the extent of nominal and real wage rigidity in Italy. Using a switching regime model of individual wage changes, which accounts for both the determinants of notional wage changes and measurement errors in individual wages, the paper sheds l...

Recent studies argue that the spread-adjusted Taylor rule (STR), which includes a response to the credit spread, replicates monetary policy in the United State. We show (1) STR is a theoretically optimal monetary policy under heterogeneous loan interest rate contracts in both discretionay and commitment monetary policies, (2) however, the optimal r...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the changes in the Italian wage distribution using administrative data from 1985 to 1996. Various statistical indicators are used to document a slight, but not negligible, increase in wage inequality. Standard decompositions of inequality indices by population subgroups shed light on the underlying caus...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro-data from the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS) to estimate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity. The determinants of wage changes are explicitly modelled, as is the measurement error deriving from the fact that earnings inclusive of benefits, not hourly wages, are available in the da...

This paper uses longitudinal data from the BHPS, waves 1-8, to document low-income dynamics and persistence for individuals living in Britain in the 1990s. Poverty exit and re-entry rates are estimated and the resulting distribution of time spent in poverty is calculated, both in single and in multiple-spells frameworks. Following Stevens (1999), I...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...

We are grateful to the European Central Bank, IZA, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Volkswagen Foundation for their generous support. Philippe Moutot, and Francesco Mongelli provided helpful guidance as our contacts at the ECB. The discussants and participants at the IWFP conference held in Frankfurt in June 2004 provided useful input that...

This paper analyses the changes in the Italian wage distribution from 1985 to 1999, using the "Worker History Italian Panel" (WHIP). The rise in wage inequality is first documented using various statistical indicators. Standard decompositions of inequality indices by population subgroups shed light on the underlying causes of the observed distribut...

Theoretical considerations suggest that workers holding temporary contracts should accumulate more general human capital than workers under permanent contracts. Using matched employer-employee data, we find empirical support for this hypothesis, by showing that dismissed temporary workers are more likely to change economic sector than workers losin...