Essays on Non-Standard forms of Employment in Italy

Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in the number of workers employed in precarious or atypical jobs in Italy and many other industrialised countries. The term “non-standard jobs” encompasses contractual arrangements for work that is not full-time, indefinite, part of a subordinate bilateral employment relationship, or performed at the employer’s premises. This dissertation examines the impact of the rise in non-standard jobs on the Italian labour market and on the working conditions of those involved. Chapter 1 introduces the subject of study and the process that has led to the rise in non-standard forms of employment. The meaning of “standard employment” is explained and why the standard employment relationship (SER) became the most popular contractual arrangement in the 20th century. The economic and social processes that led to a crisis of SER and the consequent rise in non-standard employment are discussed. The chapter concludes by illustrating recent labour market trends, including the rise in gig-economy jobs: crowdwork and work on demand via apps, highlighting their similarities with more established forms of non-standard work. Chapter 2 analyses the wage differential between temporary and permanent workers in Italy. Using microdata from the 2012 wave of the Italian Survey on Income and Living Conditions, we apply an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and a Quantile Counterfactual Decomposition to investigate the composition of this wage gap. The results suggest that the pay gap is positive and tends to be wider in the left tail of the income distribution. In the whole sample, the differences in the distribution of personal characteristics in the two groups help explain the wage gap, however when we focus on younger and non-European workers, we notice that the wage gap is fully explained by differences in the coefficients associated with worker characteristics. Chapter 3 deals with voucher work, typically for very short-lived activities, a few hours of work, and a pay-as-you-go scheme. Voucher work shares many features with crowdwork and work on demand via apps. Based on administrative data on vouchers used in Tuscany between 2010 and 2017, we estimate the impact of a restrictive policy change regarding the spread of this instrument. To do so we first apply a sharp regression discontinuity design and then calculate a difference-in-differences estimator to compare the behaviour of private employers to that of employers in the public sector. The results of the two approaches are consistent and show a significant negative impact of the reform on the use of this instrument. Chapter 4 treats the effects of home-based telework on workers’ mental wellbeing. Using microdata from the 2013 wave of the Italian EU-Labour Force Survey and related ad-hoc module, we apply a multinomial logit and semiparametric estimation of multivalued treatment effects to achieve three main objectives: i) to investigate the characteristics of regular and occasional homeworkers; ii) to understand whether home-based teleworkers are more likely to suffer deterioration in mental well-being due to time pressure or work overload than office-based workers; iii) to calculate the difference in usual hours of work and usual overtime between the different groups. The results suggest that occasional home-based workers are more likely to suffer from time pressure and work overload, while regular home-based workers are associated with longer working hours than the other groups.