Short Employment Spells in Italy, Germany and the UK: Testing the Port-of-Entry Hypothesis

Bruno Contini (), Lia Pacelli and Claudia Villosio

No 14, LABORatorio R. Revelli Working Papers Series from LABORatorio R. Revelli, Centre for Employment Studies

Abstract: This paper looks at short employment spells in three European countries: the UK, whose labour market is considered the most flexible in the EU; Italy, regarded as the least flexible; and Germany, tightly regulated, but characterised by a deservedly famous apprenticeship system. In particular, it aims to assess whether young people in short-lived jobs stand a better chance of finding a "good job" compared to their older colleagues. The increasingly held belief that - in modern economies - a "bad job" at the beginning of onÈs career is the "port-of-entry" to stable employment and to upward mobility, makes this assessment particularly relevant; i.e. it matters greatly if short-duration jobs are entry ports into better employment or become long term-traps. The lack of accepted benchmarks makes it difficult to reach strong conclusions in regard to the 'efficiency' of labour markets: cross-country comparisons help to highlight the effect of different labour market institutions on mobility and on the soundness of the "port-of-entry" hypothesis.

Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.laboratoriorevelli.it/_pdf/wp14.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Short Employment Spells in Italy, Germany and the UK: Testing the Port of Entry Hypothesis (1999)
Working Paper: Short employment spells in Italy, Germany and the UK: testing the 'port of entry' hypothesis (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wplabo:14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LABORatorio R. Revelli Working Papers Series from LABORatorio R. Revelli, Centre for Employment Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().