We investigate the causal impact of retirement on health care utilization using SHARE data for 10 European countries. We show that the number of doctor's visits and the probability of visiting a doctor more than four times a year (our measures of health care utilization) increase after retirement. The increase in health care utilization is found to depend mainly on the years spent in retirement, suggesting that adjustment may take time. We find evidence of heterogeneous effects by gender and across different patterns of time use prior to retirement (i.e., working long hours and combined work and out-of-work activities). Overall, the empirical findings suggest that the increase in health care utilization is consistent with the decrease in the opportunity cost of time faced by individuals when they retire.

In this paper we compare two mutually uncorrelated risk-attitude elicitation tasks. In particular, we test for correlation of the elicited degrees of monetary risk aversion at a within-subject level. We show that sufficiently similar incentivized mechanisms elicit correlated decisions in terms of monetary risk aversion only if other risk-related attitudes are accounted for. Furthermore, we ask subjects to self-report their general willingness to take risks. We find evidence of some external validity of the two tasks as predictors of self-reported risk attitudes in general human domains.

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This paper documents the evolution of sector-level collective agreements in Italy and investigates wage differentials associated with the diffusion of non-representative agreements, often signed by unknown organizations-that is, the so-called pirate agreements. Using employer-employee data from Social Security Archives, we find that non-representative agreements are associated with significant wage penalties (up to −8 percent) compared with regular collective agreements. Wage penalties are heterogeneous across firm size and industry affiliation. It is also shown that half of the wage differential is due to selection effects. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence of firms' coping strategies, showing that pirate agreements exhibit comparatively higher employment levels.

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This study analyses the representativeness of employer associations in Italy, using unique firm‐level data with information on employers' affiliation and their characteristics. We document that a persistent decline in affiliation rates to employers' associations has occurred during the last two decades. We show that affiliated companies are positively selected, as they tend to be larger, older, more likely to be located in richer regions, to be export and innovation oriented, and more likely to provide training. Using longitudinal data and regression decomposition techniques, we show that larger firms have been more affected by the decline in affiliation rates over time. Finally, we show that the level of representativeness of employers' associations has a weak positive effect on collective bargaining occupational wage minima settled by these organizations in national industry‐wide collective contracts after a negotiation process with trade unions.

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