Research

Working Papers:

"Decomposition of Italian Inequality": INPS Working Paper Series

joint with Cristina Tealdi,  José V. Rodríguez Mora and Edoardo Di Porto

Using Italian social security data, we demonstrate that in spite of very large differences in average income between provinces, less than 4% of both cross-sectional and lifetime income inequality can be attributed to differences between provinces. Thus geography plays only a marginal role in accounting for inequality between Italians. In contrast, information on industry of similar level of detail can explain roughly a quarter of earnings and wage inequality. Moreover, not only the level is quantitatively significant: sector of occupation is a critical component to explain the evolution of inequality. We find that majority of the rise in earnings and wage inequality in Italy between 1985 and 2018 took place between firms and that this was mainly driven by the divergence of pay between firms in different industries. Finally, the growth in inequality was extremely concentrated with just 5% of industries accounting for all of the increase in between-industry variance.

VoxEU Column: "The Role of Geography in Determining the Inequality between Italians"

"Can Industry-wide Wage Bargaining Improve Output, Employment and Inequality?"

Does it matter whether wage bargaining takes place at the industry or firm level?  I study output,  employment  and inequality in a labour search model with collective bargaining.  I find that firm-level bargaining -- whether individual or collective -- leads to wage dispersion across firms for identical workers. More productive and larger firms pay higher wages. Young firms pay higher wages, so fewer firms enter. Each firm can lower its wages by hiring more workers, so firms grow to be too large. In the model, industry level bargaining helps with these problems.  It reduces wage dispersion, which leads to more output and employment.

Collective Bargaining and the Size of Inter-Industry Wage Differentials

Does the size of employer wage premiums vary with the type of wage setting institutions? This paper provides evidence of much larger differences in wages across industries after controlling for worker and job characteristics in Eastern Europe compared to most Western European countries. Countries where collective bargaining is more prevalent and more coordinated across industries tend to have smaller inter-industry wage differentials. The predictive power of wage setting institutions in accounting for the size of inter-industry wage differentials is roughly 2-3 times greater than that of industry productivity dispersion. The greater is the coordination of wage setting across sectors in a given country, the weaker is the association between industry productivity and industry wage premiums.

Work in progress:

”Globalisation, Firm-level Volatility and the Erosion of Collective Bargaining ”

joint  with Sarah Schroeder

"Lifetime Income Inequality Within and Between Provinces in Italy"

joint with Cristina Tealdi,  José V. Rodríguez Mora and Edoardo Di Porto