Fabio Berton

Are temporary jobs a port of entry into permanent employment

Purpose - This paper seeks to explore whether temporary jobs are a port of entry into permanent employment and to argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered. Design/methodology/approach - The paper bases its empirical evidence on a longitudinal sample of labour market entrants in Italy and estimates dynamic multinomial logit models with fixed effects to allow for the non-random sorting of workers into the different types of contracts. Findings - The authors show that the transition to permanent employment is more likely for individuals who hold any type of temporary contract than for the unemployed, thus broadly confirming the existence of port-of-entry effects. Yet, not all temporary contracts are the same. An order among non-standard contracts with respect to the probability of taking an open-ended job emerges, with training contracts at the top, freelance work at the bottom, and fixed-term contracts outperforming apprenticeships. Strong SSC rebates, lack of training requirements, and low legal constraints concerning renewals result in poor port-of-entry performance, as in the case of freelance contracts. Instead, mandatory training and more binding legal constraints on the use, extension, and renewals of training contracts tend to enhance the probability of getting a standard job. Originality/value - Most of the existing empirical literature aggregates temporary contracts in a single category, thereby ignoring a relevant source of heterogeneity.

Workers and Firms Sorting into Temporary Jobs

The liberalization of fixed term contracts in Europe has led to a two tier regime, with a growing share of jobs covered by temporary contracts. The paper proposes a matching model with direct search in which temporary and permanent jobs coexist in a long run equilibrium. When temporary contracts are allowed, firms are willing to open permanent jobs in as much as their job filling rate is faster than that of temporary jobs. From the labour demand standpoint, a simple trade-off emerges between an ex-ante job filling rate and ex-post flexible dismissal rate. From the labor supply standpoint, a trade-off emerges between an ex-ante lower job finding rate and ex-post larger retention rate. The model features a natural sorting of firms and workers into permanent and temporary jobs. It is also consistent with the observation that workers hired on a permanent contract receive more training. The paper shows that the transition from a rigid to a two a tier regime system is always associated with a transitory fall in unemployment.

Occupational Hazards of Hospital Personnel: Assessment of a Safe Alternative to Formaldehyde

Occupational Hazards of Hospital Personnel: Assessment of a Safe Alternative to Formaldehyde: Fabio BERTON, et al. Department of Public Policies and Public Choice, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy—

Human Capital Mix and Temporary Contracts: Implications for Productivity and Inequality

That human capital reduces inequality and increases productivity is a well-established result. Both links depend on the mix of human capital that individuals accumulate, i.e. on whether it is more specific or general. This paper fills a gap in the literature trying to measure whether workers accumulate disproportionally more general human capital than specific one. We exploit the temporary/permanent contract divide to measure the general/specific mix. In fact, theoretical considerations suggest that workers holding temporary contracts accumulate more general human capital than workers under permanent contracts. Using longitudinal matched employer-employee data, we find empirical support for this hypothesis, by showing that dismissed temporary workers are more likely to change economic sector than comparable workers losing their open-ended jobs. As labor market deregulation concerns raising shares of the workforce in all advanced economies, we should expect that future societies will increasingly rely on general skills rather than specific ones. This has implications for both inequality and productivity.