Elena Pirani

Is temporary employment damaging to health? A longitudinal study on Italian workers

Working conditions have changed dramatically over recent decades in all the countries of European Union: permanent full-time employment characterized by job security and a stable salary is replaced more and more by temporary work, apprenticeship contracts, casual jobs and part-time work. The consequences of these changes on the general well-being of workers and their health represent an increasingly important path of inquiry. We add to the debate by answering the question: are Italian workers on temporary contracts more likely to suffer from poor health than those with permanent jobs? Our analysis is based on a sample of men and women aged 16-64 coming from the Italian longitudinal survey 2007-2010 of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. We use the method of inverse-probability-of-treatment weights to estimate the causal effect of temporary work on self-rated health, controlling for selection effects. Our major findings can be summarized as follows: firstly, we show a negative association between temporary employment and health that results from a statistical causal effect in the work-to-health direction, and does not trivially derive from a selection of healthier individuals in the group of people who find permanent jobs (selection effect). Secondly, we find that temporary employment becomes particularly negative for the individuals health when it is prolonged over time. Thirdly, whereas temporary employment does not entail significant adverse consequences for men, the link between temporary employment and health is strongly harmful for Italian women.

Place of living and health inequality: a study for elderly Italians

The aim of this study is to explore if the context matters in explaining socioeconomic inequality in the self-rated health of Italian elderly people. Our hypothesis is that health status perception is associated with existing huge imbalances among Italian areas. A multilevel approach is applied to account for the natural hierarchical structure, as individuals nested in geographical regions. Multilevel logistic regression models are performed including both individual and contextual variables, using data from 2005 Italian Health survey. We prove that individual factors (compositional effect), even representing the most important correlates of health, do not completely explain intra-regional heterogeneity, confirming the existence of an autonomous contextual effect. These territorial differences are present among both Regions and large areas, two geographical aggregations relevant in the domain of health. Moreover, for some Regions, the account for contextual factors explains variations in perceived health, leading to an overthrow of the initial situation: these Regions perform better than expected in the field of health. For other Regions, the contextual elements introduced do not catch the milieu heterogeneity. In this regard, we expect, and solicit, a major effort toward data availability, qualitatively and quantitatively, that might help in explaining residual territorial heterogeneity in health perception, a fundamental starting point for targeting specific policy interventions.

Do Italians still contact their mother? Several differences by type of union

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to build on the knowledge about the association between type of partnership – marriage versus cohabitation – and the strength and type of contact with parents in Italy in the 2000s. We addressed this issue by considering face-to-face, telephone, and mixed contact, and by adopting a simultaneous equation approach to account for endogeneity and selection effects on two large, nationally representative surveys conducted in 2003 and 2009. Our results proved that Italian adult cohabiters of the 2000s have a lower probability of meeting their mother in person on a daily basis compared to married people, but they are more likely to have daily telephone calls with her. Overall, no differences between married and cohabitant couples appear when considering a composite indicator of mixed contact. Contacts with the mother progressively increased during the period considered, especially for cohabiters. Rather than differences between cohabiters and spouses in the frequency of contact per se, we proved the existence of differences in the form of contact, showing that contemporary societies may see changes in the way that contact is maintained.