The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of specific population sections, with regards to economic and work conditions, mental and physical well-being, and context-based factors, emphasizing the need for timely policy measures aimed at counteracting the Italian economic framework’s fragility—which poorly adapts to unexpected circumstances. Identifying the most vulnerable groups is, therefore, essential with a view to carrying out targeted measures. Concerning University, the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 could likely result in a decrease in enrollments to both the first and further years of study, with significant consequences on the future of students and the system as a whole. The class of students is of great interest, as it is made up of individuals differing from each other in many ways. Our investigation is aimed at observing anxiety levels filtering the perception of one’s anxiety state in a highly stressful time such as the pandemic from the usual anxiety levels. This evaluation allows us to evaluate the similarity of individual behaviors during the lockdown period with those from the previous period.

The paper deals with the impact of beauty on employability of people, stressing the first stage of the hiring process. In particular, we studied if there exists a preference for attractive candidates and if it does whether it depends on sex, physical features and racial characteristics.We monitored all relevant agencies offering jobs in Italy from August 2011 to September 2012 sending 11008 CVs to 1542 advertised job openings. To do so, we construct fake CVs and we sent the same CV 8 times, changing only name and surname, address, and the photo included. In particular, we sent 4 CVs with photo of an attractive and unattractive man and women, and 4 CVs without photo of an Italian and a foreign men and women to each job opening.Callbacks rates are statistically significant higher for attractive women and men than unattractive ones. Racial discrimination appears to be statistically relevant, but less than discrimination based on the physical features, especially for women.

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In this paper we analyse an economy where firms use labour as the only production factor, with constant return to scale. We suppose that jobs differ in their non-wage characteristics so each firm has a monopsonistic power. Mainly, we suppose that workers are heterogeneous with respect to their productivity. Then, each firm has incentives to offer higher wages in order to recruit the most productive workers. The competition among firms leads to a symmetric equilibrium wage which is higher than the reservation wage and to involuntary unemployment for the less productive workers, that are willing to work at the current wage but are not hired because their productivity is lower than the wage level. If firms have no institutional constraint on paying lower wages for the same job, an endogenous labour market segmentation emerges.

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