The effects of shop opening hours deregulation: evidence from Italy

Lucia Rizzica, Giacomo Roma and Gabriele Rovigatti

No 1281, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: We estimate the effects of the deregulation of shop opening hours on the market structure of the retail sector and on the size and composition of the labour force employed there. To identify these effects, we exploit the staggered implementation of a reform that allowed Italian municipalities to adopt fully flexible opening hours in the late 1990s. Our findings indicate that the possibility of opening shops 24/7 increased employment in the retail sector by about three per cent and raised the number of shops in the affected municipalities by about two per cent. The effects were concentrated amongst workers employed in larger commercial outlets that were better able to exploit the flexibility introduced by the new regime. An analysis of individual-level evidence suggests that the deregulation also produced a recomposition of employment towards regular employees rather than self-employed workers.

Keywords: regulation; retail sector; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 K20 L51 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-law and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-dis ... 281/en_tema_1281.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1281_20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().