The Italian labour market is usually held to be characterised by strong rigidities in defence of open-ended employees and by a high degree of segmentation at the expense of the workers, mostly young, employed on atypical contracts. It is not, however, always clear how the concepts of rigidity...

Precarious employment is a serious social problem, especially in those countries, such as Italy, where there are limited benefits from social security. We investigate this phenomenon by analysing the initial part of the career of employees starting with unstable contracts for a panel of Italian...