Labour Market Segmentation, Flexibility and Precariousness in the Italian North East

Official Italian statistics undervalue the presence of short-term labour contracts. A more careful account of short term labour contracts more than doubles the official figures ranking Italy among the countries with a large amount of temporary work. Temporary labour contracts represent half of the total yearly labour flows and doubled in recent years in France, Italy and Spain in an attempt to avoid labour market rigidities imposed by the employment national legislations. But temporary contracts have larger potential costs. Very little is known about temporary workers in Italy and it is therefore important to improve our understanding of their career opportunities and to asses the impact of this form labour market flexibility. A succession of temporary jobs can push workers towards more permanent forms of employment, so that worse conditions received during the temporary contract period are compensated for by better conditions in the future. But people working for short spells can be also considered as an extreme case of outsiders, who receive low wages and have worse conditions compared to permanent workers, and this situation may last for their entire working life. In the nineties the divide between movers (non tenure workers) and stayers has increased and a considerable quota of the work force is deemed to never stabilize.Regional Labour Markets; Temporary work; Tenure; Segmentation.

Can employment subsidies and greater labour market flexibility increase job opportunities for youth? Revisiting the Italian On-the-job Training Program

The CFL (On-the-job Training) programme was introduced in Italy in 1985 with the aim of reducing youth unemployment. The new programme offered employers two main advantages: it exempted them almost completely from payment of payroll taxes and it provided them with virtually the only opportunity to employ people on a basis of fixed term contracts. The paper looks at the employment impact of the programme among a subgroup of eligible workers and finds that firms taking part increased employment more than non-participating firms by almost 5%. Employers had a strong positive reaction to the tax subsidies and to the softening of the rigid employment code. The overall effect of the programme on youth employment was however limited, registering only a 1% increase, mainly because about 80% of firms never participated.Labour Policy Evaluation, Youth Unemployment, Occupation and Intergenerational Mobility, Unemployment

On-the-Job Search Over the Business Cycle

On-the-Job Search is one of the most common and efficient ways to look for a new job, most of the time workers move directly from one employment position to another (E-to-E) without an intervening spell of unemployment. E-to-E transitions are a relevant component of total labour flows and have a definite cyclical pattern. This paper computes E-to-E worker flows through the development of a vacancy chain model. An iterative procedure is used to compute the successive reallocation runs, beginning from an autonomous vacancy and then to reconstruct the complete E-to-E transition process. The procedure is implemented and applied to a large micro-panel based on a highly industrialized Italian region from 1982 to 1996. E-to-E transitions are an increasingly large portion of worker flows in the labour market. They are clearly cyclic and the number of transitions increases over time as the labour market becomes tighter. These are the flows that explain labour market dynamics in upswings and recessions. Search models that look only at flows between employment, unemployment and outside of the labour force underestimate labour mobility and its cyclical pattern.Job Flows, Search and Matching, Job to Job Mobility, Worker Flows, Business Cycle, Propagation

Labour Market Segmentation, Flexibility and Precariousness in the Italian North East

Since the late 1970s, inequality has been on the rise in a number of OECD countries. One of the main causes of economic inequality, in Italy as in many other European countries, is rooted in the segmentation of the labour market. The Italian labour market is currently described as deeply segmented between an insider ad an outsider market. In the Italian manufacturing sector the quota of stable workers has declined through time and the number of unstable workers, low qualified and low paid, has increased and represents a non-marginal quota of total employment. Frequently a young worker experiments a succession of temporary contracts at the beginning of his career and develop into a more permanent position But temporary workers have, several times, a different destiny: the situation of precariousness extends to the workers’ entire career and are to be considered as an extreme case of outsiders, who operate in bad working conditions and receive low wages compared to workers hired with an open-end contract. In this research workers in manufacturing are divided between movers and stayers. Both categories show signs of instability. The quota of tenure workers over total workers decreases and movers increase through time in a significant way. Among these are permanent movers whose work histories, fragmented and chaotic, are identified and are compared with those of workers having more stable careers.Labor precariousness, youth unemployment, fragmented workers' careers

Job flows, worker flows and mismatching in Veneto manufacturing. 1982-1996

This research exploits a large employer-level panel dataset in order to analyse employment and worker flows for all establishments in a highly industrialized region in the North- East of Italy, the Veneto. Our results have relevance for models of job creation, job destruction and labour excess reallocation. The relation between separations from and accessions to existing jobs and between worker flows and job flows is scrutinized. Excess reallocation, the difference between worker flows and job flows at the plant level, is substantial. Mortality for new job matches is quite high and many new accessions are mismatched and lead to separations. Worker flows are very high for young workers to reduce drastically for workers after 35 years of age. The time series behaviour of worker flows and job excess reallocation from 1982 to 1996 is examined; worker level heterogeneity and employer level heterogeneity are discussed in determining the cyclical pattern of such flows and their rapid increment in more recent years. On this the paper makes progress in respect to the previous literature where turnover and excess reallocation are examined mainly in a static framework.Regional Labour Markets; Job Flows; Worker Flows; Reallocation; Matched employer-employee panel data.

Ristrutturazione del sistema creditizio, piccole e medie imprese e crescita economica nel mezzogiorno

Il presente lavoro si inserisce nel dibattito in corso tra gli economisti e gli operatori economici relativo alla valutazione dell’impatto del processo di ristrutturazione del sistema bancario nazionale, iniziato nei primi anni dello scorso decennio, sulla crescita delle economie meridionali, la cui struttura economica è costituita prevalentemente da piccole e medie imprese.

Prediction of Human Phenotype Ontology terms by means of hierarchical ensemble methods

Background The prediction of human gene–abnormal phenotype associations is a fundamental step toward the discovery of novel genes associated with human disorders, especially when no genes are known to be associated with a specific disease. In this context the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) provides a standard categorization of the abnormalities associated with human diseases. While the problem of the prediction of gene–disease associations has been widely investigated, the related problem of gene–phenotypic feature (i.e., HPO term) associations has been largely overlooked, even if for most human genes no HPO term associations are known and despite the increasing application of the HPO to relevant medical problems. Moreover most of the methods proposed in literature are not able to capture the hierarchical relationships between HPO terms, thus resulting in inconsistent and relatively inaccurate predictions. Results We present two hierarchical ensemble methods that we formally prove to provide biologically consistent predictions according to the hierarchical structure of the HPO. The modular structure of the proposed methods, that consists in a “flat” learning first step and a hierarchical combination of the predictions in the second step, allows the predictions of virtually any flat learning method to be enhanced. The experimental results show that hierarchical ensemble methods are able to predict novel associations between genes and abnormal phenotypes with results that are competitive with state-of- the-art algorithms and with a significant reduction of the computational complexity. Conclusions Hierarchical ensembles are efficient computational methods that guarantee biologically meaningful predictions that obey the true path rule, and can be used as a tool to improve and make consistent the HPO terms predictions starting from virtually any flat learning method. The implementation of the proposed methods is available as an R package from the CRAN repository

Estimating forest area at the year 1990 by two-phase sampling on historical remotely sensed imagery in Italy

Forest area in the year 1990 is a fi gure of great interest under the Kyoto Protocol. This note is devoted to a scientifi c exercise for the probabilistic ex post assessment of such a fi gure in Italy. Estimation was performed by twophase point sampling, which made use of historical remotely sensed imagery. In the fi rst phase, a sample of 12 089 points was selected according to an unaligned systematic sampling and the selected points were classifi ed in land-use categories by Landsat 5 TM imagery. In the second phase, a sample of 3000 points was selected by stratifi ed sampling in which the strata were determined by the satellite classifi cation and the selected points were classifi ed by aerial photos, assumed as ground truth. A two-phase estimate of land-use coverage partitioning the Italian territory was obtained together with a conservative estimate of the sampling variance-covariance. The procedure has proved to be of relatively easy implementation and objective repeatabilityL'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore http://www.springerlink.com

Graphene oxide nanoribbons induce autophagic vacuoles in neuroblastoma cell lines

Since graphene nanoparticles are attracting increasing interest in relation to medical applications, it is important to understand their potential effects on humans. In the present study, we prepared graphene oxide (GO) nanoribbons by oxidative unzipping of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and analyzed their toxicity in two human neuroblastoma cell lines. Neuroblastoma is the most common solid neoplasia in children. The hallmark of these tumors is the high number of different clinical variables, ranging from highly metastatic, rapid progression and resistance to therapy to spontaneous regression or change into benign ganglioneuromas. Patients with neuroblastoma are grouped into different risk groups that are characterized by different prognosis and different clinical behavior. Relapse and mortality in high risk patients is very high in spite of new advances in chemotherapy. Cell lines, obtained from neuroblastomas have different genotypic and phenotypic features. The cell lines SK-N-BE(2) and SH-SY5Y have different genetic mutations and tumorigenicity. Cells were exposed to low doses of GO for different times in order to investigate whether GO was a good vehicle for biological molecules delivering individualized therapy. Cytotoxicity in both cell lines was studied by measuring cellular oxidative stress (ROS), mitochondria membrane potential, expression of lysosomial proteins and cell growth. GO uptake and cytoplasmic distribution of particles were studied by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) for up to 72 h. The results show that GO at low concentrations increased ROS production and induced autophagy in both neuroblastoma cell lines within a few hours of exposure, events that, however, are not followed by growth arrest or death. For this reason, we suggest that the GO nanoparticle can be used for therapeutic delivery to the brain tissue with minimal effects on healthy cells