Existing research on the cost of job loss has typically overlooked the role of job sorting after displacement in the perpetuation of recursive unemployment. This study aims to estimate the decline in job security associated with the type of jobs matched by displaced employees following their dismissals. Using a dataset containing the employment histories of about four million individuals working in Italy that allows for disentangling voluntary from involuntary job moves, I construct two indicators of job security attached to each specific type of job: one that captures the risk of dismissal and the other that conveys a measure of expected tenure. Then, employing an identification strategy that exploits collective dismissals as exogenous variations and a difference-in-differences methodology that uses not-yet-treated units as a control group, I estimate the impact of job loss on the expected job security of subsequent job types. I find that displacement generates an increased risk of dismissal intrinsic to the post-displacement type of jobs of about 2.38 percentage points and a lower expected tenure of around 156 days.

This work investigates the effect of a policy measure implemented by the Italian government in 2014 called “Nuova Sabatini.” This measure was aimed at easing access to credit for small and medium businesses, supporting investments in the acquisition of technological equipment. We exploit a difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal impact of the measure on different firm outcomes, namely capital stock, value-added, mean salary, and employment. Overall, we estimate that the measure significantly increased both firms’ workforce and capital stock. Furthermore, we find very heterogeneous effects on employment by sector, size of the firm, and region of location. We then extend the analysis to include firms that select into treatment multiple times, finding evidence that granting access to credit multiple times enhances the effectiveness of the measure compared to firms applying just once.

We study the impact of World War II on women's labor market outcomes in Italy, in the short and long run, using a novel dataset that combines information on war fatalities with employment records from the Italian Social Security Institute and Census data. To conduct the analysis, we exploit the exogenous variation at the provincial level of male military fatalities. First, we estimate through a difference-in-differences analysis the short and long-run effects of male soldiers' mortality during the war on women's labor force participation. Then, we check whether WWII had long-lasting effects on wages and the number of worked weeks in the period covered by our sample of administrative data, 1980-1997. Our findings suggest that WWII had both an immediate and persisting impact on female labor force participation and a long-run positive effect on worked weeks. The impact of the war on women's wages remains instead unclear.