The labour market status of many non-working persons is at the boundary between unemployment and inactivity. Like the unemployed, they seek and are available for work; unlike them, their last search action was not recent enough to meet the ILO definition of unemployment. In this paper we examine...

A long-standing economic tradition maintains that labour supply reacts to market tightness; its sensitivity to job quality has received less attention. If firms hire workers with both temporary and open-end contracts, does participation increase when more permanent jobs are available? We...

One of the most widely cited labour market indicators, the unemployment rate, is based on a conventional definition of unemployment. In Italy, following the ILO recommendations, the �unemployed� category comprises all persons who state to look for a job, to be immediately available for...

Compared with other European countries, the Italian labour market stands out for the low level of both female participation and fertility. In this paper we focus on the employment patterns of Italian mothers around the time of childbirth. Our hypothesis is that the difficulties involved in...

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar in European and Noeth American labor markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues that...

In this paper we examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who �specialize� in household production affects the labor supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motive and the network effects - i.e. the tendency of newly...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialized countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this well-known fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by the immigrants) or to an...

The negative association between fertility and female labour market participation is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. We address this problem by using an exogenous variation in family size caused by infertility shocks, mainly related to the fact that nature prevents some women from...

A coincidence in time between the volatility break associated with the "Great Moderation" and large changes in the pattern of conditional and unconditional correlations between output, hours and labor productivity was detected by Gal� and Gambetti (2009). We provide a novel explanation for...

We analyse how accounting for household production could affect labour market statistics. This topic has grown in importance since the release of the new System of National Accounts in 2008. Because the traditional headcount ratios focussing on the number of people carrying out some home and...