It is estimated that only 5 per cent of musicians in Italy are regularly employed. In an attempt at nderstanding such a peculiar situation, we build a theoretical model of the musicians’ labour market in which we embed the main institutional features of the Italian system. The presence of taxation encourages the formation of a black labour market for musicians and discourages talented agents from becoming full-time musicians in all second-best economies. In Italy both tendencies are particularly strong, and exacerbated by the peculiarities of the pension system for musicians. These inefficiencies might be corrected by a twofold policy: the reform of the pension system, highly desirable but unlikely to be politically feasible in the current Italian institutional setting, and the introduction of a sufficiently large unemployment benefit for musicians, step that has a general interest for any second-best economy and not only for the case of the musicians’ labour market, and that might instead be viable under certain circumstances.
Kind of black: the musicians’ labour market in Italy
BALESTRINO, ALESSANDRO
2012-01-01
Abstract
It is estimated that only 5 per cent of musicians in Italy are regularly employed. In an attempt at nderstanding such a peculiar situation, we build a theoretical model of the musicians’ labour market in which we embed the main institutional features of the Italian system. The presence of taxation encourages the formation of a black labour market for musicians and discourages talented agents from becoming full-time musicians in all second-best economies. In Italy both tendencies are particularly strong, and exacerbated by the peculiarities of the pension system for musicians. These inefficiencies might be corrected by a twofold policy: the reform of the pension system, highly desirable but unlikely to be politically feasible in the current Italian institutional setting, and the introduction of a sufficiently large unemployment benefit for musicians, step that has a general interest for any second-best economy and not only for the case of the musicians’ labour market, and that might instead be viable under certain circumstances.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
