Do Temporary Contracts Increase Work Accidents? A Microeconometric Comparison between Italy and Spain

This paper analyzes the effect of contract type on the rate of work-related accidents in Italy and Spain, using the 1999 LFS ad hoc module. This database provides, for the first time, the possibility of analyzing not only work accidents by contract type; it also allows us to relate these variables to a wide array of personal and job characteristics of the victims of accidents as compared to those not suffering such accidents, and also on a cross-country comparative analysis. After some descriptive analysis, the paper presents two econometric exercises. First, several probit analyses of the probability of suffering a work-related accident show that, once the personal and job characteristics of workers are controlled for, the differences in the probability of suffering a work accident between open-ended and temporary workers vanish. This happens in both countries and similar results are achieved when the sample is restricted to workers with at most 3 years of tenure. Second, a decomposition analysis of the mean differences in probabilities is undertaken showing that, both in Italy and Spain, personal and job characteristics tend to increase the probability of having an accident for temporary workers, but that the specific influence of the contract type favours these temporary workers, who tend to show a lower probability on this account. However, the different relative strength of these effects in both countries explains why the total effect is against temporary workers in Spain and against permanent workers in Italy