Documents Contini, Bruno 9 results

"Italy's labour market suffers from a serious pathology, in addition to the increasing precariousness of the young workforce common to all EU member countries: flows from regular employment to non-employment are very often dead-ends. A vast number of young individuals who lose their job only a few months or years after their first hire enter the ranks of the long-term unemployed or leave the workforce altogether, never to regain regular employment even after as long as twenty years. Many join the ranks of the irregular economy, many drop out of the labour force. "Workforce disposal" refers to the process generating this pathology. Prolonged stagnation of the Italian economy is an important long run macroeconomic determinant of workforce disposal. But there are several factors that have an important impact in the short and medium run. In this study we set out to investigate such determinants. Workforce disposal is present also in Spain, though to a lesser extent than Italy. Informed media report that similar developments are taking place also in countries of Eastern Europe, although no scientific evidence is yet available. And it would be surprising if the economies of Portugal and Greece were immune from the disease. Our exploration of the Italian case makes use of the WHIP longitudinal database originating from Social Security records."

"We investigate various stylized facts on wage growth, labor mobility and firm size, to date unexplored in Italy. Using a wage decomposition that allows to separate “individual premiums” from firm-effects, we ascertain: (1) whether movers are better off than stayers; (2) whether firm size affects the outcome of workers' mobility across; and (3) the extent to which did job displacement and redeployment inflict wage losses to downsized workers. The sample – a closed panel of full-time male employees, aged 20-50, at work from 1986 to 1991 – is drawn from the employer-employee linked database WHIP (Work Histories Italian Panel). "

"In this paper we question the hypothesis of full rationality in the context of job changing behavior, via simple econometric explorations on microdata drawn from WHIP (Worker Histories Italian Panel). A rational outcome of the job matching process implies a positive tradeoff between future wages and risk-on-the-job. The main result of this paper is that no “rational” tradeoff is observable after controlling for a variety of possible shifters. However, if we control for individual characteristics and replace wage growth by its predictor net of individual effects, the picture changes with the emergence of a significantly positive tradeoff between wage growth and risk-on-the-job. The interpretation is suggestive: while market forces (net of individual effects) drive towards a rational outcome, individual characteristics, instead of reinforcing the “rationality” of a positive tradeoff, lead towards the opposite direction of confounding good and bad options. Our explanation for these findings is that people act on the basis of bounded rationality à la Simon. If our assessment is correct, the implications are powerful: are there reasons to believe that such patterns are found only in the context of job search and worker mobility and not in other instances of economic behavior? Recent literature on bounded rationality strongly suggests the contrary. Why, then, should economists leave unchallenged and unchallengeable the hypothesis of full rationality? Had our investigation aimed at estimating the elasticities of wage growth and job safety of the workers' utilities, we would have miserably failed. Is this a consequence of a misspecified model or of the wrong behavioral assumptions? Our support unquestionably goes to the latter. "

"In this paper we investigate the existence of negative jobless duration dependence and the impact of jobless spells on future wages. Our findings are somewhat out of line compared with analogous explorations. We find evidence of very long unemployment duration of the young male labor force, higher than reported anywhere else in Western Europe, as well as large negative unemployment duration dependence. On the other hand, young Italian men experiencing jobless periods in their early careers face small re-employment wage losses. Such losses do increase with the duration of joblessness, but they are lower than reported in the USA, Canada, the UK, France, and Spain."

"This study proposes a new approach to the analysis of non-employment and its duration in Germany, Italy and Spain using administrative longitudinal databases. Non-employment includes the discouraged unemployed not entitled to draw unemployment benefits and the long-term inactive. Many of the non-employed individuals will never return to the official labour market. We estimate the magnitude and duration of non-employment, applying the survival methodology developed in recent years to deal with 'workforce disposal'. Long-term non-employment (LTNE) may lead to dramatic changes in individual lifestyles, family and childbearing projects, levels of poverty and welfare at large."

"The paper presents a two-period "nutshell" model that explains the composition of labour demand when the labour market is dualistic and workers may be hired via permanent (P) or temporary (T) contracts. The model does not explain the level of labor demand, nor the wage of permanent workers, assumed to be exogenous. This is the main difference with the more sophisticated structural model of Bentolila et al. (2012) where employment and wages are jointly determined. The nuthsell model delivers, however, a number of easily testable hypotheses – very relevant for policy – that the structural model does not handle."