Documents Barbieri, Paolo 9 results

"This article deals with the relation between labour market regulation and the dynamics of overall employment and unemployment in continental Europe. We investigate the impact of the reforms of employment protection systems and activating welfare policies and test the integrative power of marginal labour market deregulation, assessing occupational outcomes of changing workforce exposure to unemployment and fixed-term contracts. Thus, particular attention is paid to the possible effect of ‘institutionally driven' labour market segmentation, mirrored by the national discrepancy in employment protections of workers with distinct contractual arrangements and by the ratio of expenses on GDP in active versus passive labour market policies. We use pseudo-panel data based on European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) (1992–2008) and apply linear fixed effect (FE) models with lagged independent variables. The deregulation measure—the insider–outsider differentials—is based on the OECD employment protection legislation index (EPL 2013). The overall findings indicate a detrimental effect of unbalanced passive and active labour market policies, a negative trend of permanent employment, and a ‘honeymoon effect' of partial and targeted deregulation measures whose effectiveness on overall employment, if any, appears to be progressively weakened over time. The responsiveness of employment conditions to marginal EPL variations as well as to previous ‘unstable employment situations' is significantly higher in Southern Europe. Temporary employment, if compared with unemployment, may still play a role in reducing individual subsequent unemployment risks, but its ‘integrative effect' is hardly confirmed if we view fixed-term contracts as a stepping stone towards stable insertion into the primary labour market. "

La "flessibilizzazione" del mercato del lavoro è stata proposta come una risposta alla crisi economica e come requisito per la crescita economica e occupazionale. Molti paesi europei hanno optato per un modello specifico di deregolamentazione del mercato del lavoro "parziale e selettiva", aumentando i cosiddetti rapporti di lavoro "non-standard", mentre la regolazione dei rapporti di lavoro già esistenti rimaneva in gran parte invariata. L'Italia è un esempio di questa strategia di "deregolamentazione ai margini". In questo paper, che si basa sui risultati di un più ampio progetto di ricerca, indaghiamo il processo in corso di "flessibilizzazione" del mercato del lavoro italiano e le sue conseguenze, sia a livello micro sia in termini di disuguaglianze sociali. Lo facciamo analizzando in una prospettiva longitudinale le singole carriere occupazionali, economiche e demografiche. I nostri risultati mostrano come la specifica forma di flessibilizzazione, abbia portato a forti cleavages sociali oltre che ad una ulteriore segmentazione del mercato del lavoro, favorendo un processo di accumulazione dei rischi sociali sulle coorti più giovani (e sulle donne). Tuttavia, le conseguenze negative non sono limitate alle carriere professionali, colpiscono anche la vita privata e familiare dei soggetti. Metodologicamente, utilizziamo event history analisis e modelli panel per far fronte ai problemi di eterogeneità non osservata, applicati ai dati ILFI, Eu/It-Silc, Istat FSS 2009, integrati da informazioni tratte da ECHP e dall'European Social Survey."

"This article deals with families' risk of entering poverty as a consequence of childbirth in four European Union (EU) welfare clusters. Poverty risks around childbirth are institutionally stratified according to specific characteristics of national welfare systems and the value they assign to family policies as well as the kind of labour market deregulation. While southern European countries are known for having welfare systems that make few provisions for ‘the future generations of citizens', conservative and social-democratic countries differ significantly in the amount of their investments in family policies. We compare households' risks of entering poverty at childbirth between Southern Europe and the rest of Europe using pooled longitudinal European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data and applying panel models and propensity score matching. We show that childbirth is very poverty inducing only in southern Europe, especially for the less ‘labour market–attached' households (precarious worker families, the unemployed) and traditional single-earner families, thereby pointing out the under-protectiveness of the Southern European systems of family and social policies. This situation is exacerbating additional inequality as families' well-being largely depends on the previous unequal social stratification of resources. "

"This article explores cross-national variations in young school-leavers' labour market entry process across 17 European countries from 1995 to 2009. The general aim is to disentangle the role of the macro-contexts by analysing the influence of a series of institutional factors on the speed of the school-to-work transition and the prestige of the first relevant job. The influence of the vocational orientation of the educational systems, the employment protection legislation and the product market regulation are theoretically considered and empirically evaluated. Relying on micro-data from the 2009 Ad Hoc Module of the European Labour Survey, we disentangle the role of long-term institutional settings and the influence of short-term institutional changes. Moreover, we test for a possible institutional macro-level trade-off between speed and quality of the school-to-work transition. Finally, we find evidence of significant interactions between the employment protection and vocational orientation of the educational system and between product- and labour market regulation."

"In-work poverty received increasing attention over the last years, due to its overall increase. This article documents the diffusion, persistency and the drivers of in-work poverty in Italy since the early 2000s. In-work poverty affects around 10 to 12% of the relevant working population, but is strongly stratified by individual and family level characteristics, like education, employment position and contract, as well as by the household composition, in terms of employed people. The presence of a (whatever type of) second work-income keeps families out of in-work poverty. Additionally, the article shows how in-work poverty is a very sticky phenomenon, leading to the accumulation of inequalities and also to their persistency over time. Such stickiness is explained by individual and household's structural factors rather than to genuine state dependency. The article concludes with a discussion of these findings in terms of policy implications."

"In this article, we provide a longitudinal account of institutionally originated, cohort inequalities in a two-tier labour market, taking Italy as an exemplary case of partial and targeted deregulation. We examine the incidence and career consequences of temporary employment relying on panel data, across reforms implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s. A substitution effect is found for the initial stages of workers' careers: while the youngest cohorts of school-leavers increasingly enter the flexible labour market, access to stable positions is hampered. Previous experiences in the flexible segment of the labour force also increase the risk of entrapment in temporary jobs. This lock-in dynamic is more visible for post-reforms cohorts and might have increased labour market inefficiency. Indeed, the entrapment risk has risen disproportionately for those individuals whose (un)observed characteristics could instead predict a faster exit from the flexible labour market, possibly towards stable positions. Our findings cast doubts on the transitory nature of temporary work in Italy and on the efficiency of partial and targeted reforms."

"This paper examines the occupational and social impact of labour-replacing technologies in Western European countries. Our study combines data on job tasks created with O*Net 3.0, information on regional robots exposure created with data from the International Federation of Robotics, and microdata from the EU-LFS from 1997 to 2017 that were longitudinalised by applying pseudo-panel models. We investigate unemployment risks associated with the introduction of labour-saving technologies as well as changes in workforce composition and possible modifications to the occupational stratification of European societies caused by the introduction of these new technologies. In addition, we examine the “shrinking-middle-class” hypothesis as we are interested in analysing the impact of robotics on social stratification in Europe. Our results reveal that the degree to which the process of technological innovation is embedded in institutions is highly relevant to understanding the stratification effects of robotics. This finding calls into question the deterministic – that is, the intrinsically functionalistic – perspective that underlies the economic approach of SBTC/RBTC theories. Overall, we find that a process of technical change lies at the root of different upgrading scenarios in Europe, with Northern Europe demonstrating the most positive effects of this process. Central Europe appears more stable, and technology here currently seems to be inducing only mild growth in non-manual and non-routine jobs, a reduction in unemployment risks, and an overall “upgrading” of employment- and class structure. The “losers” of the process of technological change appear to be the Southern European countries, which are currently experiencing a reduction in employment levels for low- and mid-educated male workers as well as an overall downgrading of occupational and class structures. Overall, our results do not confirm any convergent trend of technological unemployment or of “hollowing out the middle class”.

"This study focuses on the consequences of the use of computerized work equipment (hereafter: computer use) on the content and quality of work. It investigates, first, the relationship between computer use and both job tasks and task discretion and, second, their mediating role for the relationship between computer use and job satisfaction. With our German-UK comparison, we contribute to the long-standing debate on the upskilling/de-skilling nature of the use of technology and its repercussions on the quality of work. We analyse data from the Skills and Employment Surveys for the UK and the BIBB/BAuA Employment Surveys for Germany using structural equation modelling. In line with the literature on routine-biased technological change, we show that computers are complementary to the performance of less routine and more abstract cognitive tasks and that this relationship is conducive to a higher level of task discretion and job satisfaction in both countries. Accounting for differences in job tasks performed, we find a negative direct effect of computer use on both task discretion and job satisfaction in the United Kingdom but not in Germany. Our results indicate that the ultimate effect of computer use on both task discretion and job satisfaction depends on the institutional contexts in which technology is introduced."