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International audience; Our empirical analysis studies the impact of computer use on out of employment transitions of older workers, disentangling the effect of using a PC at work from that of being PC literate. Data are drawn from the 2000, 2002 and 2004 waves of the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth. We provide empirical evidence that, even controlling for a wide set of covariates, older employees who use a PC at work have a higher probability of remaining employed in the future. However, our results also indicate that, once PC literacy is controlled for, the use of a PC at work decreases only marginally the risk of becoming not employed (i.e. the effect is smaller than the one registered when we do not control for PC literacy)

The Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) Index, developed by Eichengreen et al. [1994], is widely used to study currency crises as a tool to signal whether pressures on a currency are softened or warded off through monetary authorities’ interventions or whether a currency crisis has originated. In this paper we show how the index is sensitive to some assumptions behind the aggregation of the information available (exchange rates, interest rates and reserves), especially when emerging countries are involved. Specifically, we address the way exchange rate variations are computed and the impact of different definitions of the reserves, and we question the constancy of the weights adopted. These issues compound with the choice of a fixed threshold when crisis episodes are identified through EMP. As a result, the dichotomous crisis variable thus derived when adopted as a dependent variable may lead to varied results in subsequent econometric analysis.