Existing research on the cost of job loss has often overlooked the role of job sorting following displacement in contributing to recursive unemployment. This study estimates the effect of displacement on the job security associated with the occupations matched by displaced workers following dismissal. Using a dataset containing the employment histories of approximately four million individuals working in Italy, which allows for disentangling voluntary from involuntary job moves, I construct two sector-specific occupational indicators of job security that I attach to each employment spell: one capturing the risk of dismissal and the other conveying a measure of expected tenure. Then, employing an identification strategy that exploits collective dismissals as exogenous variations and the staggered treatment timing at which they occur, I find that displacement leads to an increase in the risk of dismissal inherent to post-displacement occupations of about 2.36 percentage points and a lower expected tenure of around 155 days. These effects correspond to an approximately 12-to-13% decline in job security relative to pre-displacement averages.

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 shorter- and the longer-run, using a novel dataset that combines information on war fatalities with employment records from the Italian Social Security Institute and Census data. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that analyzes the impact of WWII on female participation in the labor force in Italy. To conduct the analysis, we exploit the exogenous variation of male military fatalities at the provincial level. First, we estimate the short- and long-run effects of male soldiers' mortality during the war on women's labor force participation using a difference-in-differences analysis. Second, we test whether WWII had long-lasting effects on wages and the number of worked weeks in 1980-1997, the period covered by our administrative data sample of $385,000$ female workers. Our findings suggest that WWII had both an immediate and a persistent effect on female labor force participation and a long-run positive effect on worked weeks. In contrast, we do not find any evidence of a war impact on women's wages.