Temporary Workers in Italy: Who Are They and Where They End Up

Abstract

Temporary work has been an important component of employment growth in Italy since the early 1990s. This paper focus upon labour market transitions of temporary workers in order to test whether temporary work enhances the subsequent labour market chances. We use propensity score matching to compare subsequent employment outcomes of people who have recently acquired a temporary job with those of people who remained unemployed. Individuals' hetero geneity explains a good amount of the raw differences in the subsequent labour market status of temporary workers and the comparison group. Yet there appears to be a sizable net gain from experiencing a temporary work. Our benchmark average estimate is a 30 percentage points rise in the 'satisfactory employment' chances 1 year after the start of the temporary work experience. The net gains are the largest for females and adult people and the areas with low unemployment; moreover, gains are the largest for the most recent years in our sample and for those people who were (according to the propensity score estimates) either least or most likely to exit from unemployment. Copyright 2008 The Authors.

This Time It's Different? Youth Labour Markets during ‘The Great Recession’

“…Zijl et al (2011) analysing the situation in the Netherlands in more detail find that although temporary jobs do shorten unemployment durations, they do not lead to an increase in the likelihood of being in regular employment subsequently. In Italy several studies (for example, Ichino et al (2005Ichino et al ( , 2008 and Barbieri & Sestito (2008)) have found a weak positive effect of temporary employment on the chances of finding permanent employment, although Gagliarducci (2005) finds that the intermittence of work experience associated with temporary work tends to impede the transition to permanent employment and Berton et al (2008) whilst noting that the probability of the transition to permanent employment is higher from temporary employment than unemployment, they also observe that the existence of strong state dependence or persistence in temporary employment; particularly, for young people, there is a tendency towards 'permanent precariousness' with new labour market entrants becoming trapped in repeated short-term contracts.…”

Social inequality in higher education and labour market in a period of institutional reforms: Italy, 1992–2007

“…Despite the small proportion of tertiary graduates, a university degree does not lead to a great advantage in the labour market: the wage premium over diploma holders is modest (Strauss and de la Maisonneuve 2007) and university graduates also have a longer search for their first job (Bernardi et al 2004). 3 Moreover, tertiary graduates have a higher risk of starting their job career in unstable positions than lower-educated people (Schizzerotto 2002;Barbieri and Scherer 2009) and from existing research it is not clear if it is easier for them to exit from this situation (Barbieri and Sestito 2008;Barbieri and Scherer 2009).…”

“…These transformations are likely to have increased the competition and uncertainty in the labour market among university graduates in the last cohorts (Schizzerotto 2002;Reyneri 2006;Barbieri and Scherer 2009;Barbieri and Sestito 2008).…”

Joint analysis of occurrence and time to stability after entrance into the Italian labour market: an approach based on a Bayesian cure model with structured stochastic search variable selection

“…Since we work conditionally on the latent indicators, for sampling the parameters, we make use of the complete likelihood (2).…”