Abstract

The author intervenes in the debate about the crisis of Italian labour law, in order to stress the necessity of a closer dialogue, in this field, between law scholars and economists. The conceptual schemes formed by the latter are, firstly, indispensable to the former for the critical examination of the function and the constitutional justification of the mandatory rules which regulate most aspects of the employer/employee relationship; secondly, the same schemes are indispensable for a rational re-assessment of the field of application of those rules, especially in reference to the problem of the redistribution of protection between subordinate employment and some categories of self-employment; thirdly they are indispensable in order to give concreteness to some rules which are of crucial importance for labour law but extremely generic, such as the one which forbids unjustified dismissal. The essay examines, as examples, the direct importance which is assumed, from this point of view, by the insider/ outsider model formulated by Lindbeck and Snower, the principal/agent model, especially in the particular version proposed by Aghion and Hermalin, the dynamic monopsony model and finally the micro and macro-economic criticism of the concept of the just cause of dismissal.