The (long) run out of unemployment: are temporary jobs the shortest way?

A higher job creation is a common result by many theoretical approaches trying to model marginal labor market reforms. In the framework proposed by Berton and Garibaldi [2006], in particular, the equilibrium arrival rate of temporary job offers is expected to be higher than the arrival rate of permanent ones. In this paper I use a sample of prime aged male workers from WHIP in a competing risks framework in order to compare the duration of unemployment spells terminated by jobs that only di¤er in their formal duration. I fnd that the arrival rate of fixed term jobs is actually larger than the arrival rate of permanent ones; this result is robust to the main sources of unobserved heterogeneity. However, the average duration of unemployment in Italy is still very high and the liberalization of flexible contracts as a policy to reduce it did not completely solve the problem.