1,720,994 research outputs found
Duration dependence in the exit from a temporary job: does contract type matter?
No full textIn order to enhance the flexibility of the labour market and to stress the capabilities to create jobs, a progressive liberalization of flexible contracts has been adopted in Italy during the Nineties. This paper provides a description of the transition patterns of temporary workers towards a stable job, identifying the duration dependence associated with a temporary work experience. In other words, the crucial question is the extent to which temporary contracts represent a stepping stone towards an open ended job and whether the Treu law has modified the traditional pattern in terms of duration dependence. I base my empirical evidence on a longitudinal sample of workers in Italy, using an administrative dataset extracted by the social security archives for the years 1992-2002. Empirically, I adopt a single risk proportional hazard model, employing a piecewise constant baseline hazard. I find that the introduction of Treu law has substantially reduced the positive duration dependence in the probability of moving from temporary to permanent job. Additionally, this result is robust to the adoption of several specifications. However, not all temporary contracts show the same pattern: for instance, TWA employment and apprenticeship (in some time spans) exhibit negative duration dependence after the reform, suggesting a less relevant positive effect of continuous employment on the subsequent career paths
The implications of temporary jobs on the distribution of wages in Italy: an unconditional IVQTE approach
No full textUsing Italian data, this paper investigates the wage implications of temporary jobs across the whole pay profile using unconditional quantile regression (UQR) models. Results clearly indicate that the wage penalty associated to temporary jobs is significantly larger at the bottom of wage profile and is almost absent for high-wage jobs. This is in line with the sticky floors hypothesis, supporting the idea that the wage gap for temporary employees depends on their position in the wage distribution for low-paid jobs. To recover a causal interpretation, I employ an instrumental variable (IV) strategy. I adopt the unconditional instrumental variable quantile treatment effects (IVQTE) estimator proposed by Frolich and Melly, which corrects for endogenous selection in temporary contracts. The IVQTE estimates yield similar results to standard UQR, even if the wage penalty is larger in size at the bottom of the wage distribution and disappears at the top quantiles. This evidence highlights that policies aimed at increasing flexibility may reinforce the two-tier nature of the Italian labour market and the relative wage inequality
Higher education expansion, human capital externalities and wages: Italian evidence within occupation
Full text linkThe Italian system of higher education has recently experienced a process of radical transformation. The so-called 3+2 university reform reflects a big increase in the supply of college graduates that has attracted the attention of policy makers and fostered the debate on the size of human capital externalities. Using the 2009 Italian Labour Force Survey and incorporating a measure of graduate density within each occupation, in this article, we explore whether the social returns to education exceeds the private return and less educated workers gain more than college educated workers from spillovers associated with higher college share in their relative occupation. The OLS results clearly indicate that increases in graduate density have positive effects on wages and that the effect is larger for less educated workers, also controlling for potential confounding factors. However, the concentration of college workers across occupations is such that we may have a potential endogeneity problem. In order to recover a causal interpretation and to isolate the effect of graduate density, we employ an IV strategy exploiting the lagged demographic and occupational structure and the variation in the introduction of 3+2 courses at regional level. Merely, IV estimates largely indicate that the size of spillovers is significantly increased with respect to standard OLS results. Indeed, we estimate that a 1% increase in the college share within occupation raises wages by 0.9-1.3% for male and female, respectively. The effect is further larger for less educated workers
The impact of Bologna process on the graduate labour market: demand and supply
No full textThe Bologna process inspired the Italian 3+2 reform of the university system which constitutes a big increase in the supply of college graduates. This paper is a preliminary attempt to identify the effects of the reform on (i) the relative probability (relative to nongraduates) of employment of college graduates in the age range 25-34; (ii) their quality of employment measured with the relative probability of being employed with a temporary contract; (iii) the college wage premium. Using administrative data to identify the gradual introduction of the reform in different universities, we find that the reform increases significantly the relative employment of graduates except for women in the South where the rapid increase of female post-reform graduates has not been absorbed by the weak labour market. Finally we find that post-reform college graduates have a significantly lower college premium with respect to high school graduates than pre-reform graduates
Who gains from active learning in higher education?
No full textWe study whether and how teaching style (i.e. traditional vs active mode) affects academic performance of young individuals in tertiary education. We focus on entrepreneurship education as an ideal subject for experimenting alternative teaching methods. Identification relies on Triple Difference estimates based on detailed administrative data for the universe of students in a Master’s program in Management in Italy. Our preferred estimates show no significant effects of the teaching mode on student’s achievement. However, further estimates reveal interesting heterogeneities across students, being active teaching more effective in the case of females and students from secondary schools with an academic track
Personalità dell’imprenditore e risultati d’impresa: un’indagine sugli imprenditori italiani
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Is the Nature of Jobs Changing? The Role of Technological Progress and Structural Change in the Labour Market
No full textWe examine the process of radical transformation that during the last decades has changed labor markets in developed countries and, in particular, the nature of jobs. Indeed, the advances in ICT and robotics have generated the concern that automation could substitute people in a wide range of activities, therefore contributing to the potential increase in the fraction of jobs at risk in the next future. However, empirical evidence on labour demand in the majority of OECD countries emphasizes a process of labour market polarization that consists in the hollowing out of routine occupations accompanied by a quasi-simultaneous rise of non-routine occupations, both high skilled conceptual and manual low skilled ones. This process has been explained by the routinization hypothesis, whereby computer-based technologies allow machines to perform repetitive tasks and replace workers in routine jobs where such tasks are prevalent. In this perspective, structural and occupational changes are naturally interwined with technological change; their understanding can therefore help unravelling the features of new technologies and how they can influence demand for skills. In such a setting, entrepreneurship can play an important role as driver of innovation and employment growth
Knockin’ on heaven’s door? Reframing the debate on temporary employment and wages: evidence from Europe
Full text linkThis article reframes the debate on the consequences of flexibilization in European labour markets focusing on the unexplored impact of temporary employment on occupational wages for permanent workers. Exploiting the variation in the temps’ density within occupation and age groups across European countries between 2003 and 2010, we find that temporary contracts negatively affect occupational average wages for insiders’ workers. These results are still robust using a dynamic system based on generalized method of moments (GMM-SYS) to account for potential endogeneity issues. We also explore the existence of heterogeneity across different occupational clusters and institutional settings. Our estimates indicate that the knock-on effect is large in countries with low employment protection legislation and it is driven by occupations characterized by untechnical work logics
Healthy, wealthy or busy? Self-employment and healthcare services utilization in Europe
Full text linkIn this paper we investigate the relationship between different types of self-employment and
healthcare utilization across Europe. The empirical analysis is based on 2004 and 2014 individual
data for 21 European countries from the European Social Survey (ESS), which, in these two waves,
contains detailed information on individual employment status and use of healthcare services. After
controlling for selection into employment status, our estimates point out that, compared to the
employees, the self-employed without employees are significantly less likely to use healthcare
services, while no statistically significant differences emerge for the other type of self-employed
(i.e., those with employees). Further exploratory analyses seem to indicate that these differences are
driven by a number of factors, such as differences in perceived health, wealth and opportunity costs.
An important role is played by cross-country differences in healthcare systems: in particular, we
find that self-employed without employees are much less likely to use healthcare services where the
latter are provided by private actors
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