Documents Leombruni, Roberto 8 results

"Anti-immigrant stances are central in far-right populist propaganda. We investigate whether the electoral success of far-right populist parties affects the labor market conditions of immigrants. Using administrative panel data from Italian manufacturing workers in 1994–2005, we show that higher electoral support for the populist party Lega Nord significantly increases injury risks for foreign workers within job spells. This effect is most pronounced in small firms, which are characterized by lower levels of unionization and employment protection. The increase in injury rates appears driven by task reallocation to overtime and night shifts and to the exploitation of immigrants' labor supply rigidity. While alternative factors such as import competition and robotization influence injury risk, they fail to explain our core findings."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Applying propensity score reweighting to Italian administrative data covering the period 1994-2012, we study the conditional distributions of injuries by wage of native and foreign workers and distinguish between the component that is explained by observable characteristics and the component that is instead attributable to the immigrant status. Our analyses highlight some stylized facts. Besides a substantial gap in wage and injury risk that cannot be attributed to differences in the characteristics, foreign workers face higher levels of risk by the same level of wages. The gap is significantly above the level predicted by their observable characteristics by remunerations that are close to the minimum wage level set by collective bargaining. After this threshold, injury rates decline, but less steeply for foreign workers than their observable characteristics would predict. We show that the hedonic wage model could explain the first result as a corner solution whereby workers with low wage potential are forced to accept higher levels of risk due to the lower bounds on minimum wage. The second results could simply be explained by assuming different utility functions for natives and foreigners. We also show that the hedonic wage model is compatible with the marked reduction in injury rates and in the gap that we observe in the recession years.

"A unique dataset from Italy is used to study the effect of unfavorable business cycle conditions at entry on future workplace safety of young workers. We find that higher local unemployment rates at entry have a positive effect both on severe injuries and non-severe injuries. While the impact of unemployment at entry on severe injuries is constant over time, the effect on non-severe injuries is less pronounced and increases with experience, thus indicating that the reporting behavior is affected by initial conditions. In addition, the same cohorts of workers experience slower wage growth, despite being initially compensated for the occupational injury risk. These results suggest that entrants during recession may be persistently locked into low quality jobs and that the mix of hazardous tasks offered by employers throughout the business cycle can be used to overcome wage and other institutional rigidities of the Italian labor market."

"Gender differences in the labor market are typically measured by the wage gap. In this paper, we investigate how extending the analysis to an additional job amenity, namely workplace safety, may shed new light on the evolution of gender differences. Our results show that focusing on one unique measure of the gender gap may provide a biased view of the actual progress of women in the labor market. In our data, a significant reduction in the wage gap has been accompanied by a relative increase in injury risk for some groups of workers, e.g. low-skilled female workers. The decreased gender wage gap for these workers does not necessarily imply an overall improvement in their labor market outcomes."

"Le disuguaglianze professionali nella speranza di vita, osservate in Italia finora solo a livello di aree metropolitane negli anni Novanta, hanno sollevato dubbi circa l'equità attuariale degli effetti distributivi dell'attuale sistema contributivo di stima dei benefici pensionistici.I risultati preliminari di uno studio condotto su un campione della popolazione lavorativa italiana del settore privato mostra, per la prima volta a livello nazionale, l'esistenza di disuguaglianze significative nella speranza di vita negli anni Duemila a svantaggio delle carriere professionali con meno reddito e qualifica operaia; questo viene corroborato da analoghi risultati ottenuti aggiornando agli anni Duemila l'osservazione dello Studio longitudinale torinese.Il presente studio suggerisce che, per ragioni di equità attuariale, l'algoritmo di stima dei benefici pensionistici della riforma Dini potrebbe incorporare la dimensione delle differenze di speranza di vita per carriera lavorativa."

"Il lavoro è uno dei luoghi dove si creano opportunità ma anche rischi per la salute, che nascono ad esempio quando percorsi di carriera difficoltosi limitano le possibilità di realizzazione personale ed espongono l'individuo a rischi di disagio psico-sociale. Negli ultimi decenni le condizioni strutturali di queste relazioni sono mutate profondamente, anche per le riforme attuate verso un sistema di flexicurity. Questo lavoro ricostruisce innanzitutto questo processo in un'ottica di equità, rispetto alla distribuzione dei rischi e al ruolo svolto dal welfare. Introduce poi un indicatore di inclusione del mercato del lavoro che somma gli occupati, a quanti, non lavorando, sono beneficiari di qualche misura di protezione sociale. L'indicatore è utilizzato per studiare quali sono i gruppi sociali "sommersi" dall'arrivo della crisi, e quali sono stati "salvati" dalla rete del welfare. I risultati mostrano condizioni dei gruppi sociali peggiorate in modo eterogeneo, e uno stato sociale che non è stato in grado di attenuare in modo universale gli effetti negativi della crisi, contribuendo anzi ad amplificare le disuguaglianze."

"We investigate the long term employment outcomes of Italian injured workers over a time period when the country introduced policy reforms that increased labor market flexibility but reduced job security. Using an employer-employee database matched with injury data, we observe that both before and after the reforms almost one-fourth of injured workers were no longer employed 3 years after their “first” return to work. We note a slight decrease in this share after the reforms (from 24 to 22%) while we find a decline in workers' job security as measured by their probability of re-employment in permanent contracts. We use multinomial logit estimates to study how liberalization reforms were associated with a changing role of individual, firm, and injury characteristics in shaping long-term employment outcomes of injured workers after their recovery period. Heterogeneity analyses show that low wage employees, women, immigrants, and individuals who suffered a more severe injury were penalized more. Pre-injury individual characteristics became stronger predictors of long-term employment than firms' characteristics. In particular, we find that the advantage provided by working in larger firms was significant before the liberalization reforms, but disappeared afterward, while the advantage provided by human capital became more relevant after the liberalization."