Quaderni di Dipartimento [serie ordinaria – Anno 2020]

Using an international historical perspective this study aims at identifying the main empirical regularities, as well as countries' similarities and differences, in the long-run growth pattern of government expenditure, in order to distinguish among existing, competing theories of government growth. The application of nonparametric and parametric analyses to a sample of developed countries observed over the 1880-2011 period allows us to detect two main findings. 
The first is that, beyond the long-term growth of government expenditures in absolute terms, there is evidence of three expansionary long waves corresponding to the pre-armament booms in the WWs periods and the "golden age of public sector intervention". The latter is the reduction of the degree of cross-country 
heterogeneity in the pattern of relative and absolute growth of government expenditure since the 1960s. 
The "ratchet phenomenon" in the pre-WWII period and the change of the prevailing ideology from market failures to government failures in the more recent period provide explanations complementary to Wagner's law and consistent with the observed long-term evolution of the relative (and absolute) growth of government expenditure.

This article contributes to the nascent literature on the effect of grade retention in school on later labour market success. A field experiment is conducted to rule out the endogeneity of both outcomes. More concretely, various treatments of grade retention are randomly assigned to fictitious résumés sent in application to real vacancies. Overall, grade retention does not significantly affect positive call-back by employers. However, when narrowing in on vacancies for occupations where on-the-job training is important, job candidates with a record of grade retention are 16% less likely to receive a positive reaction. This finding is consistent with Queuing theory.

The so-called 'IMF-OECD consensus' suggests that labour market deregulations increase employment and reduce unemployment. We present a first meta-analysis on the subject based on MAER-NET guidelines. We examine the relation between Employment Protection Legislation indexes on one hand and employment and unemployment on the other. Among 53 academic papers published between 1990 and 2019 and contained in the Web of Science, only 28% supports the 'consensus' while the remaining 72% report results that are controversial (21%) or contrary to the 'consensus' (51%). The decline in 'consensus' is particularly evident in the last decade. Results are independent of the citations of the papers examined, the impact factor of the journals and the techniques used. A FAT-PET meta-regression model confirms these outcomes.