The Dynamics of Unemployment, Temporary and Permanent Employment in Italy

This paper evaluates whether and on the extent to which temporary jobs have been a springboard to regular jobs in Italy. Using the 2000, 2002, and 2004 waves of the Survey of Italian Households' Income and Wealth several dynamic unobserved effects probit models for the probability of having a permanent job are estimated. The main results show that a temporary position, rather than being unemployed, significantly increases the probability of having a permanent job 2 years later of about 13.5-16 percentage points. The robustness of this stepping stone effect is then assessed relaxing the parametric assumptions on unobserved individual heterogeneity.