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Eurasian grapevine is a widely cultivated horticultural plant worldwide, but it is more susceptible to powdery mildew. In recent years, the high cost and negative environmental impact of calendar-applied sulfur fungicides are leading research to find alternative remedies. In this study, the early prediction (three days) of the first appearance of powdery mildew infection, on two different Italian grapevine cultivars, was detected through a partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA). The treatment indications of the “PLSDA” models (treatments according to the predictive model) were compared with those of the “Standard” (treatments according to the established agricultural practice of the area). This allowed the early containment of the disease, preventing its subsequent propagation. The model was built based on weather-climate data and phytopathological information collected on the “Untreated” control cultivar to monitor the natural spread of the disease (three years of training and two of tests). For both the cultivars and the two test years (2021 and 2022), the “PLSDA” models early predicted the first appearance of fungal disease, reducing the treatment number (about four) with respect to “Standard”. In addition, analyses of key fruit quality parameters were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment reduction.

Improving the perovskite/electron-transporting layer (ETL) interface is a crucial task to boost the performance of perovskite solar cells (PSCs).

We applied an organic sensor for the detection and quantification of PbI2 released by perovskite solar cells. The molecule shows a fluorescence intensity enhancement in the presence of Pb2+ cations and is highly selective of the desired analyte.

This paper investigates whether exposure to academically gifted peers of the same and opposite gender in primary school (grade 5, at age 10) affects later academic achievement (grade 8, at age 13) and high-school track choice. For identification we exploit random allocation of kids across classes within primary schools. We document that, conditional on primary school fixed effects and grade 8 class fixed effects, as well as on baseline achievement, a higher share of same/opposite- gender high-achievers in math in primary school is related, both for boys and girls, to better/worse later math academic achievement in grade 8 and to a higher/lower probability of choosing a scientific high-school track. We argue that these results are consistent with a role model channel.

Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000266, Funder: Cambridge Trust Scholarship, Funder: Robert Gardiner Scholarship, Funder: Royal Society; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000288, Halide perovskite materials offer an ideal playground for easily tuning their color and, accordingly, the spectral range of their emitted light. In contrast to common procedures, this work demonstrates that halide substitution in Ruddlesden–Popper perovskites not only progressively modulates the bandgap, but it can also be a powerful tool to control the nanoscale phase segregation—by adjusting the halide ratio and therefore the spatial distribution of recombination centers. As a result, thin films of chloride‐rich perovskite are engineered—which appear transparent to the human eye—with controlled tunable emission in the green. This is due to a rational halide substitution with iodide or bromide leading to a spatial distribution of phases where the minor component is responsible for the tunable emission, as identified by combined hyperspectral photoluminescence imaging and elemental mapping. This work paves the way for the next generation of highly tunable transparent emissive materials, which can be used as light‐emitting pixels in advanced and low‐cost optoelectronics.

Entry in many occupations is regulated with the objective to screen out the least able producers and guarantee high quality of output. Unfortunately, the available empirical evidence suggests that in most cases these objectives are not achieved. In this paper we investigate entry into the legal profession in Italy and we document that such a failure is due to the combination of the incomplete anonymity of the entry exam and the intergenerational transmission of business opportunities. We use microdata covering the universe of law school graduates from 2007 to 2013 matched with their careers and earnings up to 5 years after graduation. Variation generated by the random assignment of the entry exam grading commissions allows us to identify the role of family ties in the selection process. We find that connected candidates, i.e. those with relatives already active in the profession, are more likely to pass the exam and eventually earn more, especially those who performed poorly in law school. When we simulate the process of occupational choice assuming family connections did not matter, we find that strong positive selection on ability would emerge.

We analyse theoretically and empirically the effects on young people’s labour market outcomes of two specific labour market institutions and their interaction: employment protection legislation and active labour market policy. The paper examines recent policy reforms in Italy focussing on the impact of the 2012 Fornero reforms of employment protection legislation as well as the initial impact of the EU-wide Youth Guarantee scheme introduced in Italy in March 2014. The paper then examines how these two policy reforms interacted. The analysis first confirms the finding that the Fornero reform increased permanent hires particularly amongst the very youngest workers; it then goes on to find that the YG was indeed successful in increasing the hires of young people, although this operated through a statistically significant increase in female hires on temporary contracts. Third, it finds some evidence of a dampening effect of the YG on EPL reforms as predicted by theory.

How does finance affect employment and inter-industry job reallocation? We present a model that predicts that financial development (i) increases employment and/or labour productivity and wages, with a smaller impact at high levels of the equilibrium wage and financial development; (ii) may induce either more or less reallocation of jobs depending on whether shocks to profit opportunities or to cash flow predominate; (iii) amplifies the output and employment losses in crises, firms that rely most on banks for liquidity being hit the hardest. Testing these predictions on international industry-level data for 1970–2003, we find that standard measures of financial development are indeed associated with greater employment growth, although only in non-OECD countries, and are not correlated with labour productivity or real wage growth. Moreover, they correlate negatively with inter-industry dispersion of employment growth. Finally, there is some evidence of a ‘dark side’ of financial development, in that during banking crises employment grows less in the industries that are more dependent on external finance and those located in the more financially developed countries. — Marco Pagano and Giovanni Pica

We study the distributional effects of globalization within a model of heterogeneous agents where both managerial talent and knowledge of the local economic environment are required in order to set up a firm in a given country. Therefore, agents willing to set up a firm in a foreign country need to incur a learning cost that depends on how different is the foreign entrepreneurial environments from the domestic one. In this context, we show that globalization fosters FDI and raises wages, output and productivity. Moreover, it benefits workers and highly talented multinational entrepreneurs, while harming low-ability domestic producers. The effects of openness follow from highly efficient foreign entrepreneurs driving inefficient local firms out of the market. We provide empirical evidence consistent with the implications of the model, showing a significant negative effect of the distance between nationwide regulations indexes on bilateral FDI flows.

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in the need for reallocation at the sectoral and aggregate level to assess the average effect of EPL on firms’ policies. Then, exploiting firm-level information we study if the effect of EPL is stronger in firms with lower levels of internal resources. We find that, on average, EPL reduces investment per worker, capital per worker and value added per worker in high reallocation sectors relative to low reallocation sectors. The reduction in the capital-labour ratio is less pronounced in firms with higher internal resources, suggesting that financial constraints exacerbate the negative effects of EPL on capital deepening.

We apply a novel measure of intergenerational mobility (IM) developed by Güell, Rodríguez Mora, and Telmer (2014) to a rich combination of Italian data allowing us to produce comparable measures of IM of income for 103 Italian provinces. We then exploit the large heterogeneity across Italian provinces in terms of economic and social outcomes to explore how IM correlates with a variety of outcomes. We find that (i) higher IM is positively associated with a variety of “good” economic outcomes, such as higher value added per capita, higher employment, lower unemployment, higher schooling and higher openness and (ii) that also within Italy the “the Great Gatsby Curve” exists: in provinces in which mobility is lower cross-sectional income inequality is larger. We finally explore the correlation between IM and several socio-political outcomes, such as crime and life expectancy, but we do not find any clear systematic relationship on this respect.

We investigate how Internal Labor Markets (ILMs) allow complex organizations to accommodate positive and negative shocks calling for costly labor adjustments. Adverse shocks affecting one unit in the organization are shown to increase workers' mobility to other units rather than external firms, with stricter employment protection in the adversely hit unit causing an additional increase in internal mobility. The ILM response to adverse shocks is also stronger when the receiving units in the organization are more productive and have a better financing capacity. We also find that affiliated units faced with positive shocks to their growth opportunities rely on the ILM for new hires, especially managers in the top layers of the organization and other high-skilled workers, thus overcoming human capital bottlenecks that may curb growth. ILMs therefore emerge as a co-insurance mechanism within organizations, allowing them to bypass both firing and hiring frictions, and providing job stability to employees as a by-product.

We apply a novel measure of intergenerational mobility (IM) developed by Guell, Rodriguez Mora, and Telmer (2014) to a rich combination of Italian data allowing us to produce comparable measures of IM of income for 103 Italian provinces. We then exploit the large heterogeneity across Italian provinces in terms of economic and social outcomes to explore how IM correlates with a variety of outcomes. We find that (i) higher IM is positively associated with a variety of "good" economic outcomes, such as higher value added per capita, higher employment, lower unemployment, higher schooling and higher openness and (ii) that also within Italy the "the Great Gatsby Curve" exists: in provinces in which mobility is lower cross-sectional income inequality is larger. We finally explore the correlation between IM and several socio-political outcomes, such as crime and life expectancy, but we do not find any clear systematic relationship on this respect.

Empirical studies have widely demonstrated that real-world activities are rarely on their production frontier. Hence, an obvious concern arises towards the detection of inefficiencies affecting sectoral performances. The current literature and practice have widely explored the sources of inefficiency internal to decision-making units. This paper argues that a major role is played by external effects due to inefficiency spillovers propagating through interindustry transactions. In order to take this mechanism into account, the paper suggests assessing sectoral performances by a system approach that makes use of shadow prices of intermediate inputs. Our approach is able to disentangle sectoral inefficiencies into internal sectoral inefficiencies and inefficiencies imported from other sectors. The latter component is due to inefficiency spillovers that appear to be empirically relevant in all sectors of five OECD countries.

This paper estimates the causal impact of dismissal costs on capital deepening and productivity exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving ring costs unchanged for larger firms. We show that the increase in firing costs induces an increase in the capital-labour ratio and a decline in total factor productivity in small firms relativeto larger firms after the reform. Our results indicate that capital deepening is more pronounced at the low-end of the capital distribution - where the reform hit arguably harder - and among firms endowed with a larger amount of liquid resources. We also find that stricter EPL raises the share of high-tenure workers, which suggests a complementarity between firm-specific human capital and physical capital in moderate EPL environments.

Employment protection may affect both productivity and capital investment because higher adjustments costs hamper allocative efficiency and may therefore affect both the optimal capital labor input mix and total factor productivity. To estimate the impact of dismissal costs on capital deepening and productivity we exploit a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We provide evidence that the increase in firing costs induced capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity in small firms relative to larger firms after the reform. We also find that capital deepening is more pronounced at the low-end of the capital distribution – where the reform arguably hit harder – and among firms endowed with a larger amount of liquid resources, that have more room to react thanks to an easier access to the credit market. Our results also indicate that the EPL reform reduced the probability to access the credit market, possbily because stricter EPL reduces both the value of the firm and the amount of internal resources that the firm can pledge as collateral against lenders.

This paper estimates the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on workers' individual wages in a quasi-experimental setting, exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Accounting for the endogeneity of the treatment status, we find that the slight average wage reduction (between –0.4 and –0.1 percent) that follows the increase in EPL hides highly heterogeneous effects. Workers who change firm during the reform period suffer a drop in the entry wage, while incumbent workers are left unaffected. Results also indicate that the negative wage effect of the EPL reform is stronger on young blue collars and on workers at the low-end of the wage distribution. Finally, workers in low-employment regions suffer higher wage reductions after the reform. This pattern suggests that the ability of the employers to shift EPL costs onto wages depends on workers' and firms' relative bargaining power.

Using data from the Bank of Italy’s Household Survey we find that a wage curve exists in Italy after the 1992-93 wage reforms for annual and monthly wages but not for hourly wages. Consistently, after the reforms we find a negative elasticity of annual hours and months worked with respect to the unemployment rate.

Aging is a global phenomenon. If older individuals are less productive, an aging working population can lower aggregate productivity, economic growth and fiscal sustainability. Therefore, understanding the age-productivity gradient is key in a aging society. However, estimating the effect of aging on productivity is a daunting task. First, it requires clean measures of productivity. Wages are not such measures to the extent that they reward other workers attributes than their productivity. Second, unobserved heterogeneity at workers, firms and workers/firms level challenges the identification of the age-productivity gradient in cross-sectional data. Longitudinal data attenuate some identification issues, but give rise to the problem of partialling out the effect of aging from the pure effect of time. Third, the study of the age-productivity link requires investigating the role of experience and of seniority. We tackle these issues by focussing on a sample of Gran Prix Formula One drivers and show that the age-productivity link has an inverted U-shape profile, with a peak at around the age of 30-32.

This paper provides evidence that incumbent and entrant firms' access to business group deep pockets affects entry patterns in product markets. Relying on a unique French data set on business groups, this paper shows that entry in manufacturing industries is negatively related to the cash hoarded by incumbent-affliated groups, and positively related to entrant groups' cash. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that the impact on entry of group cash holdings is more important in environments where financial constraints are pronounced and in more financially dependent sectors. The cash holdings of incumbent and entrant groups also affect the survival rate of entrants in the 3 to 5 year post-entry window. Overall, our findings suggest that internal capital markets operate within corporate groups and affect the product market behavior of affliated firms by mitigating financial constraints.

We provide evidence suggesting that incumbents’ access to group deep pockets has a negative impact on entry in product markets. Relying on a unique French data set on business groups, our paper presents three major findings. First, the amount of cash holdings owned by incumbent-affiliated groups is negatively related to entry in a market. Second, the impact on entry of group deep pockets is more important in markets where access to external funding is likely to be more difficult. Third, the “entry deterring effect” of group deep pockets is more pronounced when groups have more active internal capital markets. Our findings suggest that internal capital markets operate within corporate groups and that they have a potential anti-competitive effect.

We study the distributional effects of globalization within a model of heterogeneous agents where both managerial talent and knowledge of the local economic environment are required in order to become a successful entrepreneur. Agents willing to set up a firm abroad incur a learning cost that depends on how different the foreign and domestic entrepreneurial environments are. In this context, we show that globalization fosters FDI and raises wages, output and productivity. However, not everybody wins. The steady state relationship between globalization and income is U-shaped: high- and low-income agents are better off in a globalized world, while middle-income agents (domestic entrepreneurs) are worse off. Thus, consistently with recent empirical evidence, the model predicts globalization to increase inequality at the top of the income distribution while decreasing it at the bottom.

Estimating the effect of aging on productivity requires clean measures of productivity. Additionally, one needs to control for unobserved heterogeneity at the worker, firm and worker/firm level, to account for the role of experience and to correct for selection bias. We tackle these issues exploiting a panel of Gran Prix Formula One drivers, which provides a unique setting to single out the data requirements needed to credibly estimate the effect of age on productivity. Results robust to the inclusion of worker, firm and match effects show that the age-productivity link has an inverted U-shape profile with a peak at the age of 30–32. The use of repeated cross-sections of individuals also produces consistent results provided that cohort effects are properly accounted for. Relying on team-average measures of productivity makes instead inference harder.

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in the need for reallocation at the sectoral and aggregate level to assess the average effect of EPL on firms’ policies. Then, exploiting firm-level information we study if the effect of EPL is stronger in firms with lower levels of internal resources. We find that, on average, EPL reduces investment per worker, capital per worker and value added per worker in high reallocation sectors relative to low reallocation sectors. The reduction in the capital-labour ratio is less pronounced in firms with higher internal resources, suggesting that financial constraints exacerbate the negative effects of EPL on capital deepening.

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental setting. We consider a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Estimates which account for the endogeneity of the treatment status due to workers and firms sorting around the 15 employees threshold show no effect of the reform on entry wages and a decrease of the returns to tenure by around 20% in the first year and by 8% over the first two years. We interpret these findings as broadly consistent with Lazear’s (1990) prediction that firms make workers prepay the severance cost. JEL Classification: E24, J63, J65

Labor market regulations have often being blamed for high and persistent unemployment in Europe, but evidence on their impact remains mixed. More recently, attention has turned to the impact of product market regulations on employment growth. This paper analyzes how labor and product market regulations interact to affect turnover and employment. We present a matching model which illustrates how barriers to entry in the product market mitigate the impact of labor market deregulation. We, then, use the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the interaction between barriers to entry and dismissal costs. We exploit the fact that costs for unjust dismissals in Italy increased for firms below 15 employees relative to bigger firms after 1990. We find that the increase in dismissal costs after 1990 decreased accessions and separations in small relative to big firms, especially for women. Moreover, consistent with our model, we find evidence that the increase in dismissal costs had smaller effects on turnover for women in sectors faced with strict product market regulations.

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effect of a reform that introduced a cost for unjust dismissals only for firms below 15 employees, while leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We find that the increase in dismissal costs decreased accessions and separations in small relative to big firms, the more so in sectors with higher employment volatility. Moreover, the reform reduced firms’ entry rates while increasing the exit rate. We also find evidence that higher EPL flattened employment policies over the cycle

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. We exploit the fact that this reform increased unjust dismissal costs for businesses below 15 employees, while leaving dismissal costs unchanged for bigger businesses, to set up a natural experiment research design. We find that the increase in dismissal costs decreased accessions and separations for workers in small relative to large firms, especially in sectors with higher employment volatility, with a negligible impact on net employment. We also find some evidence suggesting that the reform reduced firms' entry rates and employment adjustments, but had no effect on exit rates.

This paper explores how the political support for Labor Market Regulation (LMR) is affected by economic and political integration in a two-country overlapping generations model where countries behave strategically. We model LMR as wage regulation and analyze three institutional settings: Autarchy, Economic Union and Political Union. We show that, if the economy is dynamically efficient, the support for labor regulation is lower in the Economic Union - characterized by capital mobility - than in Autarchy. This decreases the welfare of the owners of the less mobile factor (labor) even in a setting where today workers are next period capitalists. A Political Union restores, under symmetry, the autarchic outcomes and welfare levels. The asymmetric case is also analyzed.

Labor market regulations have often being blamed for high and persistent unemployment in Europe, but evidence on their impact remains mixed. More recently, attention has turned to the impact of product market regulations on employment growth. This paper analyzes how labor and product market regulations interact to affect turnover and employment. We present a matching model which illustrates how barriers to entry in the product market mitigate the impact of labor market deregulation. We, then, use the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the interaction between barriers to entry and dismissal costs. We exploit the fact that costs for unjust dismissals in Italy increased for firms below 15 employees relative to bigger firms after 1990. We find that the increase in dismissal costs after 1990 decreased accessions and separations in small relative to big firms, especially for women. Moreover, consistent with our model, we find evidence that the increase in dismissal costs had smaller effects on turnover for women in sectors faced with strict product market regulations.

Labor market regulations have often being blamed for high and persistent unemployment in Europe, but evidence on their impact remains mixed. More recently, attention has turned to the impact of product market regulations on employment growth. This paper analyzes how labor and product market regulations interact to affect turnover and unemployment. We present a matching model which illustrates how barriers to entry in the product market mitigate the impact of labor market deregulation. We, then, use the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the interaction between barriers to entry and dismissal costs. We exploit the fact that costs for unjust dismissals in Italy increased for firms below 15 employees relative to bigger firms afeter 1990. We find that the increase in dismissal costs afeter 1990 decreased accessions and separations in small relative to big firms, especially for women. Moreover, consistent with our model, we find evidence that the reduction in dismissal costs had smaller effects on turnover for women in sectors faced with strict product market regulations.

This paper investigates the effects on firms’ occupational structure of shocks induced by the intro-duction of Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs) in importing countries. We rely on the Specific Trade Concern (STC) data released by the WTO to identify trade-restrictive TBT measures, combined with matched employer-employee data for the population of French exporters over the period 1995-2010, and with information on the list of product-destinations served by each French exporter. Controlling for time-invariant firm/occupation effects and for time-varying sector/occupation shocks, IV estimates show that exporters respond to increased complexity associated with restrictive TBTs at destination by raising the share of managers at the expense of blue collars, white collars and professionals. This evidence is consistent with the growing literature exploring how firms organize their workforce composition in presence of exogenous (foreign) shocks; and it is also related to the well-beaten literature on the labour market effects of trade.

The group of contributors in this book come from academia and international organizations in Europe and the USA. They focus on trade unions, which affect real-wage flexibility and the provision of training to workers. They also concentrate on employment protection legislation, which discourages firms from firing old workers and also from hiring new ones. The structure of housing market imperfections that can greatly affect regional mobility is also discussed.

Defect‐mediated recombination losses limit the open‐circuit voltage (VOC) of perovskite solar cells (PSCs), negatively affecting the device's performance. Bulk and dimensional engineering have both been reported as promising strategies to passivate shallow defects, thus improving the photovoltaic conversion efficiency (PCE). Here, a combined bulk and surface treatment employing chlorine‐based compounds is employed. Methylammonium chloride (MACl) is used as a bulk additive, while 4‐methylphenethylammonium chloride (MePEACl) is deposited onto the perovskite surface to produce a low‐dimensional perovskite (LDP) and reduce nonradiative recombination. Through structural and morphological investigations, it can be confirmed that bulk and surface doping have a beneficial effect on the film morphology and its overall quality, while electroluminescence (EL) and photoluminescence (PL) analyses demonstrate an increased and more homogeneous emission. Applying this double passivation strategy in PSC fabrication, a boost is observed in both the short‐circuit current density and the VOC of the devices, achieving a champion 21.4% PCE while improving device stability.