Purpose To analyze the association between unemployment and suicide in Italy during the years 1990-2014, with a peculiar focus on the Great Recession (GR) and the role played by social protection as buffering mechanism against the negative effect on health outcomes. Methods Fixed effects panel regressions were used to assess the association between changes in unemployment rate and suicide rates. Additional models investigated the role of active labor market programs (ALMPs) as possible moderators of the association. Analyses were carried out for both males and females, stratified by age and region. Results The negative time-trend displayed by suicide rate in Italy until 2007 was slowed down by changes in unemployment at the beginning of the GR, when this trend reversed and the rate of suicide started increasing. Male workers aged 25-64 and women aged 55-64 years were affected by both "normal" unemployment rate fluctuations as well as severe economic crises. Women aged 35-44 were only influenced by the latter. Men benefit from ALMPs mainly in Central Italy, while women did not benefit significantly from ALMPs. Conclusions In Italy, economic downturns were associated with increased suicides mainly among men, while severe economic crises were associated with increased suicides among both men and women. ALMPs showed to be effective in moderating the association between unemployment and suicide among men aged 45-54 only in Central Italy. The overall small effectiveness of such programs may be due to lack of sufficient funding.

From the mid-1990s on, the suicide rate in Italy declined steadily, then apparently rising again after the onset of the Great Recession, along with a sharp increase in unemployment. The aim of this study is to test the association between the suicide rate and unemployment (i.e., the unemployment rate for males and females in the period 1977-2015 and the long-term unemployment rate in the period 1983-2012) in Italy, by means of co-integration techniques. The analysis was adjusted for public unemployment spending (referring to the period 1980-2012). The study identified a long-run relationship between the suicide rate and long-term unemployment. On the other hand, an association between the suicide and unemployment rate stemmed out, though statistically weaker. A 1% increase in long-term unemployment increases the suicide rate by 0.83%, with a long-term effect lasting up to eighteen years. Public unemployment spending (as percentage of the Italian Gross Domestic Product) may mitigate this association: when its annual growth rate is higher than 0.18%, no impact of unemployment on suicide in detectable. A decrease in the suicide rate is expected for higher amounts of social spending, which may be able to compensate for the reduced level of social integration resulting from unemployment, helping the individual to continue to integrate into society. A corollary of this is that austerity in times of economic recession may exacerbate the impact of the economic downturn on mental health. However, a specific ''flexicurity'' system (intended as a combination of high employment protection, job satisfaction and labour-market policies) may have a positive impact on health. 2001 [25], while Stuckler et al. collected data referring to mortality in 1970-2003 (including 2006) [12]. Our intention was to fill this gap, by extending the analysis, thus including the Great Recession and the subsequent years of severe economic crisis, as well as data concerning social protection measures. Methods Data collection From the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Statistics (https://data.oecd.org/) we extracted the following data for Italy: male and female suicide rates (for the period 1977-2015), male and female unemployment rates (1977-2015), long-term unemployment rate (1983-2012), public unemployment spending expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (1980-2012). According to the OECD, "Long-term unemployment refers to people who have been unemployed for 12 months or more. The long-term unemployment rate shows the proportion of these long-term unemployed among all unemployed." [34] On the other hand, "Public unemployment spending is defined as expenditure on cash benefits for people to compensate for unemployment. This includes redundancy payments from public funds, as well as the payment of pensions to beneficiaries before they reach the standard pensionable age, if these payments are made because the beneficiaries are out of work or for other labour market policy reasons. This indicator is measure...

This paper investigates the importance of different modes of spatial flexibility as well as of the distinction between autonomy and discretion to find plausible explanations of the so-called autonomy paradox, which maintains that the more the job autonomy that remote e-workers have the greater the effort they put into their work with adverse effects on work-related stress. Using multiple regressions, we test the hypotheses regarding the direct influence of autonomy, discretion and work intensification as well as their interaction effects on occupational stress in two subsamples of 1.380 home-based e-workers and 2.574 mobile ones drawn from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. The main findings are as follows. Home-based e-workers perceive that autonomy (namely over work goals) directly decreases occupational stress and buffers work intensification (i.e. autonomy over work goals and in the organizational choices of their department/company). In the context of remote e-work, discretion is more likely to boost the stressful impact of work intensification when work is mobile. At the same time, we do not find that autonomy increases work intensification, neither among mobile e-workers, nor among home-based e-workers (for whom it buffers the adverse impact of work intensification). In summary, this study does not confirm the existence of an autonomy paradox associated with remote e-work. Contrarily, it suggests that such a paradox is more likely to surface when research relies on conceptual frameworks that ambiguously define autonomy in terms of what should be more properly conceptualized as discretion.

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A significant number of empirical studies, focusing on different countries, have found a positive link between migration and trade. This paper studies the relationship between emigration, immigration and trade using Italian data. The sample regards 51 foreign trading partners and spans from 1990 to 2005. The results suggest that networks of Italian emigrants in foreign countries boost bilateral trade. The effects of immigrants are weak on exports and negative on imports. Results do not change when cultural and institutional dissimilarities between countries are considered.International migration, Italian bilateral trade,