The availability of a flexible labour force might influence adjustment decisions regarding the rigid part of the labour force. To test this idea, we contrast the use of trainees (fixed-term contracts) and normal-contract workers (open-end contracts) when a reform made it more costly to use...

We provide a general characterization of diffusion processes, allowing to analyze both risk-sharing and contagion at the same time. We show that interdependencies are beneficial when the economic environment is favorable, and detrimental when the economic environment deteriorates. The risk of...

We analyse the effects of motherhood on women’s working career using WHIP, a database that records individual work histories together with childbearing events. We investigate two main issues: the career penalty and the wage penalty (better known in the literature as family wage gap). We focus...

In Italy, about 28% of young males starting their first job in the private sector during 1989-1993 left their jobs in the first two years; some of them experienced job to job transitions but the majority of them experienced long jobless periods. A number of empirical studies suggest that the...

Questo articolo stima le probabilità di entrare e uscire dallo stato di povertà (poverty dynamics) e la sua persistenza in Italia negli anni ‘90, attingendo dalle fonti longitudinali dello European Community Household Panel, 1994-2001. Combinando le stime dei tassi di uscita con quelli di...

Starting from Adam Smith's intuition, compensating wage differentials are one of the most widespread explanation to describe why agents should bear occupational risk of injury and death. For nearly thirty years, economists have attempted to and empirical evidence on such wage differentials...

Using a panel of administrative Italian data (source: INPS), this paper provides new empirical evidence on the earnings mobility in Italy over a relatively long time period (1985-1996). Transition matrices have been used to document the extent to which Italian employees change their position in...

A higher job creation is a common result by many theoretical approaches trying to model marginal labor market reforms. In the framework proposed by Berton and Garibaldi [2006], in particular, the equilibrium arrival rate of temporary job offers is expected to be higher than the arrival rate of...

The liberalization of fixed term contracts in Europe has led to a two tier regime, with a growing share of jobs covered by temporary contracts. The paper proposes a matching model with direct search in which temporary and permanent jobs coexist in a long run equilibrium. When temporary contracts...