I would like to but I cannot. The determinants of involuntary part-time employment: Evidence from Italy

Over the last two decades, involuntary part-time (IPT) employment has become a more and more pressing issue in Europe, especially in the southern countries, where IPT today constitutes most part-time employment. The dualistic nature of voluntary and involuntary employment creates an opportunity to investigate this type of occupation by looking at the intersection between dualisation and gender. Using INAPP-PLUS data and Probit estimations, this paper aims to shed light on whether the determinants of IPT – at the individual, household and labour market levels – follow the trend of labour dualisation, compared to part-timers in voluntary arrangements. In particular, we aim to determine how dualisation related to these determinants varies according to gender and labour market structural changes. Our results confirm that individual and household characteristics count more than professional ones in determining IPT status, especially concerning the well-known gender differences. However, differentiating the analysis by workers' gender highlights interesting differences pointing at a growing polarisation for female workers driven not only by inequality in the work-family balance distribution but also by structural elements in the labour market

Waking and sleeping following water deprivation in the rat

Wake-sleep (W-S) states are affected by thermoregulation. In particular, REM sleep (REMS) is reduced in homeotherms under a thermal load, due to an impairment of hypothalamic regulation of body temperature. The aim of this work was to assess whether osmoregulation, which is regulated at a hypothalamic level, but, unlike thermoregulation, is maintained across the different W-S states, could influence W-S occurrence. Sprague-Dawley rats, kept at an ambient temperature of 24 \ub0C and under a 12 h:12 h light-dark cycle, were exposed to a prolonged osmotic challenge of three days of water deprivation (WD) and two days of recovery in which free access to water was restored. Two sets of parameters were determined in order to assess: i) the maintenance of osmotic homeostasis (water and food consumption; changes in body weight and fluid composition); ii) the effects of the osmotic challenge on behavioral states (hypothalamic temperature (Thy), motor activity, and W-S states). The first set of parameters changed in WD as expected and control levels were restored on the second day of recovery, with the exception of urinary Ca++ that almost disappeared in WD, and increased to a high level in recovery. As far as the second set is concerned, WD was characterized by the maintenance of the daily oscillation of Thy and by a decrease in activity during the dark periods. Changes in W-S states were small and mainly confined to the dark period: i) REMS slightly decreased at the end of WD and increased in recovery; ii) non-REM sleep (NREMS) increased in both WD and recovery, but EEG delta power, a sign of NREMS intensity, decreased in WD and increased in recovery. Our data suggest that osmoregulation interferes with the regulation of W-S states to a much lesser extent than thermoregulation