Una valutazione delle carriere dei giovani lavoratori atipici: la fedeltà aziendale premia?

This paper confronts Greenwald's model of adverse selection in the labour market, with Topel and Ward's model of job shopping. According to Greenwald's contribution, in a sequence of periods, workers' freedom to change jobs is seriously reduced by a process of adverse selection. The labour market is characterized by imperfect information, which does not allow new potential employers to evaluate workers characteristics before employment, whereas current employers are better informed about the characteristics of their employees, and will concentrate their efforts in preventing turnover from the best workers, letting the worse ones free to move to other jobs. The pool of changers is thus characterized by workers of inferior quality, compared to the pool of stayers. Topel and Ward, on the other hand, show how young workers at the beginning of their career frequently move from one job to the other, to improve their job matching. According to this theory, through a process of intense job shopping young workers have more chances to improve their working conditions. The aim of this paper is to verify which of these two theories best applies to the Italian labour market. In particular, we want to asses which of these theories best describes the career paths of young temporary workers. As our data suggests, Topel and Ward's model seems to apply to young temporary workers, whereas Greenwald's model better describes the career paths of permanent workers.