Flexibility policies in the Italian labour market: some effects of the Treu reform

摘要

In last two decades, countries characterized by high levels of employment protectionudlegislation (EPL) have introduced flexibility policies, in order to reduce elevated andudpersistent unemployment rates. European policy makers implemented reforms "at theudmargin", allowing for reduced protection only for some new contractual forms (calledudatypical contracts), characterized by lower firing costs. In Italy the first reform "at the margin" was implemented with the introduction of the Treu Law (L. 196/97), whichudintroduced temporary contracts and made fixed-term contracts more widely allowed,udin order to make the labour market more dynamic and to decrease the unemploymentudrate. To best of my knowledge, my thesis represents the first attempt to evaluate theudeffects of the Treu Reform on the Italian labour market. It is constituted by threeudchapters.udThe first of them consists in a survey in which I present a summary of framework approaches to analyse these policies and the more important implication of themudfor the labour market. Theoretical studies predict and the empirical studies show thatudthe reforms affected various dimensions of the labour markets. In general, flexibilityudpolicies seem to fail their main aims. Effects were unclear with respect to unemploymentudrate, they were substantially negative on career development, and an increasedudduality arose in terms of wage and probability of leaving unemployment.udThe second and third chapters consist of two empirical frameworks that analyseudsome effects of the larger use of atypical contracts on various dimensions of theudlabour market. Both papers use micro-data for young individuals drawn from WHIPud(Work Histories Italian Panel, Laboratorio R. Revelli) dataset. WHIP provides monthlyudinformation on job relationships and allow me to distinguish among three possibleudstates: permanent contracts (PC), atypical contracts (AC), and non working stateud(NW).