期刊名称：CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度：2000
卷号：2000
出版社：Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要：Many indicators (OECD 1994) show that the Italian labour market is characterised
by a strong pro-workers and pro-unions legislation. This is usually interpreted as a
high degree of rigidity. It is known that, in response to shocks, firms in rigid
labour markets tend to trade workers adjustment off individual working hours
adjustment (Abraham-Houseman (1994)). We analyse this trade-off for the Italian
large industrial firms, using the Kalman filter to get the impulse-response
functions of employment and working hours to permanent and temporary shocks.
We find that in the first 80s the terms of the trade off have changed, and
employment has become more responsive to shocks. Firms seem thus to have
circumvented the regulation: after the pro-workers «institutional push» of the
'70s, a process of capital/labour substitution has allowed them to re-form their
profit margins and to minimise the labour input. Institutions have tried to
incentivate new hirings reducing the bias in favour of workers. Consequently, a
deregulation process started in 1983-84 is changing the Italian labour market.
Nonetheless, deregulation per se is unlikely to cause new hirings in an
environment where the labour input has been minimised.
