A key issue in increasing women’s participation in productive activities is the possibility of achieving a high work-life balance, both in terms of personal wellbeing and in terms of fair career prospects. The crucial event that challenges any level of work-life balance working women achieve...

This paper looks at short employment spells in three European countries: the UK, whose labour market is considered the most flexible in the EU; Italy, regarded as the least flexible; and Germany, tightly regulated, but characterised by a deservedly famous apprenticeship system. In particular, it...

We use a 1998 - 2004 sample from WHIP in order to study the labor market transitions of young entrants. We consider seven labor market tates: permanent and temporary employment, apprenticeship, training pogrammes, self employment, quasi subordinate jobs and unemployment. After controlling for...

We show that the Italian wage curve, inexistent in the eighties and early nineties, has re-emerged after the 1993 Income Policy Agreements, owing to the greater role granted to flexible and locally bargained top-up wage components.

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 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...

revised version available as working paper n. 52

Many studies have been devoted to analyse the effect of maternity on working mothers; they mostly refer to countries where female participation is high. Fewer studies consider Southern European countries. This paper aims at filling the gap analysing the effects of motherhood on women’s working...

Many studies have been devoted to analyse the effect of maternity on working mothers; they mostly refer to countries where female participation is high. Fewer studies consider Southern European countries. This paper aims at filling the gap analysing the effects of motherhood on women’s working...

The existing literature ignores the fact that in most European countries the strictness of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) varies across the firm size distribution. In Italy firms are obliged to rehire an unfairly dismissed worker only if they employ more than 15 employees....