The trend over time of labour market opportunities for young people in Italy

We analyse the re-employment probabilities of young people (ages 15–24) from 1985 to 2004. We find that this 20 year period decades were characterized by an increase in youth employment, especially since the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, the employment opportunities offered to disadvantaged workers were primarily atypical and therefore did not imply a stable and permanent increase in the bulk of youth employment. In addition, although the increase in re-employment probabilities by atypical contract would be largely explainable by flexibility policies, the evolution of re-employment probabilities by permanent and fixed-term contracts would be a consequence of competing causes, including a selection of higher productive workers.