This study aims to contribute empirical evidence to the debate about the future of work in an increasingly robotised world. We implement a data-driven approach to study the technological transition in six leading Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. First, we perform a cross-country and cross-sector cluster analysis based on the OECD-STAN database. Second, using the International Federation of Robotics database, we bridge these results with those regarding the sectoral density of robots. We show that the process of robotisation is industry- and country-sensitive. In the future, participants in the political and academic debate may be split into optimists and pessimists regarding the future of human labour; however, the two stances may not be contradictory.

This paper analyses both theoretically and empirically the effects of immigration on the wage rate of native workers. There is rare evidence in empirical literature that immigration generates a fall in the wages of manual workers. By hypothesizing an economic system where advanced firms buy an intermediate good from traditional firms, which employ manual workers in both clean and dirty tasks, the latter being more disliked by native workers, we present a theoretical model that justifies these results. We conclude that native skilled wages always increase whereas native unskilled wages can both increase or decrease with immigration. An empirical analysis of the Italian labour market follows, showing that native workers' wages always rise with immigration. Copyright 2010 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The objective of the analysis is to study the relationships between GDP, energy consumption, renewable energy production, and CO 2 emissions in some European transition economies in the period 1990-2018. We use the growth rates of per capita values, in a panel VAR approach where all variables are typically treated as endogenous, allowing some inference on the causality of the relationships. The decision to focus on European transition countries is motivated by the fact that a significant part of the future of the green economy in Europe depends on the environmental and energy policies that will be implemented by these countries. In the transition economies (and years) included in the analysis, our findings suggest that investing in energy efficiency is good for the competitiveness of economies (in terms of effects on GDP growth) and is good for the environment (in terms of diminishing CO 2 emissions). Finally, an increasing production of renewable energies reduces CO 2 emissions.

Economic theory is paying increasing attention to a non-observed economy (NOE) and its causes. Recently, a couple of works (Rosser et al., 2000, 2003) have claimed that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and the size of NOE. This supposed relationship is not so clear and deserves in-depth analysis. There is a crucial aspect that has been completely avoided in these studies: income inequality is mainly measured using 'regular' incomes and this fact could lead to some bias. The existence of a certain size of NOE implies some income evasion that can affect the inequality indexes used in the study of the relationship between NOE and inequality. Including the regional share of NOE in a wage equation, I find that, in the specific case of the Italian private sector employees, the income evasion attached to NOE tends to reduce inequality measured by regular wages statistics.Underground economy, inequality, tax evasion,