Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

In 2012, an earthquake struck one of Italy’s most productive and dynamic areas, the Emilia-Romagna region. Just as policy makers are today considering green and climate-conscious investments to recover from the COVID- 19 pandemic, in 2012, the regional government granted specific energy retrofitting contributions to manufacturing and service firms affected by the seismic event. Through a panel data analysis, we evaluate the impact of such energy policy measures on firm-level labour productivity to assess the presence of non-zero multipliers. We find that energy retrofitting through regional aids positively affected firms’ labour productivity. We discuss the energy and economic policy implications of such intervention in the current framework of fiscal recovery packages.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span. Design/methodology/approach – Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women’s transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements. Findings – The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men. Originality/value – The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors’ propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

Do short-term contracts facilitate the transition into permanent contracts? We use a rich administrative database for the Emilia-Romagna northern region in Italy from 2008 to 2012 to run a stepping-stone analysis and evaluate which contractual agreement is more likely to lead to a permanent working position. We find that individual specific characteristics make it more likely for a worker to be employed with a specific contractual agreement and that the contribution towards more working stability varies with the previous contract. We conclude that fixed-term positions act more as stumbling blocks than building blocks for open-ended contracts.

Lo studio affronta il tema dell’impatto che il capitale umano qualificato ha sulla Total Factor Productivity (TFP) a livello di impresa in Emilia- Romagna, nel periodo 2008-2015. Utilizzando un campione di 42.357 imprese, corrispondenti a circa il 30% del valore aggiunto nel 2015, si è utilizzata la TFP stimata per valutare che impatto abbia il lavoro “highskilled”, misurato secondo quattro diversi tipi di indicatore. Si osserva che un incremento nel lavoro altamente qualificato implica un aumento della produttività stimata, con effetti marginali che sono solo apparentemente ridotti. Parole chiave: TFP, capitale umano, Emilia-Romagna. Classificazione JEL: D24, J24.

Do short-term contracts facilitate the transition to permanent contracts? The authors use a rich administrative database for Italy to run a stepping stone analysis and evaluate which contractual agreements have more chances to lead to a permanent working position. They find that individual specific characteristics make it more likely for a worker to be employed with a specific contractual agreement and that the contribution toward more working stability varies with the previous contract. The authors conclude that fixed term positions act more as stumbling blocks than building blocks for open-ended contracts.

Building on previous research, we address the debated question of whether temporary contractual arrangements are a stepping stone toward more stable and definitive forms of employment. In particular, we investigate the different performance of three types of contracts, fixed term, parasubordinate and apprenticeship contracts. In this study we prepared and reclassified a large observational dataset and applied propensity score estimates to a sample of over 600,000 workers observed through 2008–2015. Although the rationale behind labour market flexibilization has been partially successful in creating occupation in the country, this came at the cost of more insecure jobs and with workers being trapped into a loop of perennial renewals. Our analysis contributes effectively to the exploration of flexible term contract’ role as stepping-stone—or bottle necks—with respect to open ended contracts. We find no stepping-stone effect for fixed-term and parasubordinate contracts, together with a (weak) stepping-stone effect for apprenticeships.

This paper evaluates the impact of temporary and fixed term contracts on temporary workers’ posterior likelihood of being hired on a permanent basis in Emilia Romagna. Using administrative data from 2008 to 2015 and two different types of temporary contractual agreements (temporary agency and fixed-term contracts) as treatment, we adopt propensity score techniques to assess which one is more likely to act as a stepping stone towards permanent jobs with respect to a control group. We find no evidence for a stepping stone in the short run, with agency workers, though, performing slightly better than fixed term workers in the medium run, notwithstanding being the natural stepping stone for a permanent job a previous permanent job

This paper evaluates the impact of the Italian labour market reforms that have substantially liberalized the fixed term contract and the external collaborators. The debated question is the trade‐off between employment opportunities offered by the deregulation and the employment stability and quality after entry, in particular for the new entrants. Building on previous research, we address the question of whether temporary contractual arrangements are a dead‐end that traps workers indefinitely or just a stepping stone toward more stable and definitive forms of employments. Using micro data of more than 600.000 workers entered the labour market in the years 2008 to 2015 and two different types of temporary contractual agreements (temporary agency and fixed‐term contracts) as treatment, we adopt propensity score techniques to assess which one is more likely to act as a stepping stone towards permanent jobs with respect to a control group. We find significant poor evidence for the stepping stone hypothesis in the short run, with agency workers, though, performing slightly better than fixed term workers in the medium run.

Institutions play a fundamental role in shaping the working life pattern of dependent labour. In the years of the great recession started in 2008, firms struggled to adopt more flexible contracts, in Italy and elsewhere, to minimize the burden of labour costs and face the ups and downs of global and local market demand. Governments in Italy progressively adopted innovative types of contractual agreements to fight long-term unemployment and facilitate the matching between historically disadvantaged labour seekers (young and women) and firms. So short-term types of contracts, in addition with permanent employment contracts, became an important instrument on the labour market. The SILER database collects the obligatory communications that a labour supplier in Italy must make to a special office when starting a contract with a new employee. The communication contains information on the employee, on the type of job and sector. Another communication must be sent when the contract ends, as well when major changes in the contractual terms arise. By collecting all the information for each single worker through many years, it is possible to reconstruct workers’ career, with the length of contracts, types of contract, and so on. The data allow for testing the efficacy of the flexisecurity model in Italy, as it can be evaluated if people can find a job without facing long periods of unemployment even when the contracts offered are not permanent. Moreover, with some degree of approximation, it becomes possible to tell exactly the length of time existing between a contract and another, a very good proxy for the length of unemployment. The study is organized as follows. Section 1 contains the key elements in the institutional panorama featuring the labour market in Italy in recent years. Section 2 contains a description of the SILER database. Section 3 contains a quantitative analysis of people having a dependent labour contract in Emilia Romagna from at least 2008 onwards. This includes computing the distribution of the most commonly adopted contract by age, sex, industry and institutional type of contract, as well as the typical sequence of contractual forms for workers considered. A multinomial analysis allows for determining the factors that influence obtaining a certain type of contract. Section 4 concludes and illustrates the opportunities offered by further analyses, as for example exploring the need for implementing programs to develop skills and abilities in certain sectors, the behaviour of firms in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the introduction of instruments for limiting the abuse of flexible contractual forms by firms, the importance of foreign labour.