Job Tenure and Labour Market Regulation: A Comparison of Britain and Italy using Micro Data

Given a general belief that jobs last longer in tightly regulated labour markets, the presumption would be that jobs last longer in Italy than they do in Britain. We use two large micro datasets to address this issue. Surprisingly, we find a higher proportion of male workers in Britain than in Italy are in jobs that have lasted at least five years. This result holds conditioning on individual control variables. We find the opposite result for women, but there are reasons for treating this with some scepticism. This result suggests a complex relationship between labour market institutions and the reallocation of labour.