Kind of Black: The Musicians' Labour Market in Italy

Abstract

AbstractIt is estimated that only 5 per cent of musicians in Italy are regularly employed. In an attempt at understanding 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.