"The working life of dependent labor in Emilia Romagna: a dynamic analysis using the SILER database" paper accepted and presented at 3rd International ESS Conference "Understanding key challenges for European societies in the 21st century" 13-15th July 2016, Amphimax, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

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.