ISIGrowth findings presented at the ASTRIL International Conference

A recent Conference held in Rome devoted a special session to the ISIGrowth project. With a special focus on the European labour market

ISIGrowth results on the labour market analysis have been presented by ISIGrowth’s researchers at the ASTRIL (“Associazione Studi e Ricerche Interdisciplinari sul Lavoro”) International Conference on ‘Reassessment and perspectives of labour policies’ held in Rome, at the University Roma 3, on the 14th and 15th December 2017.

The goal of the conference was to collect and develop reflections focused precisely on the theme of “labour policy”, in order to reassess both the evidence of the recent evolution of the labour market, and the theoretical basis of the policies, in Italy and in Europe.

A special session of the Conference – “Theoretical, empirical and policy analyses of the European labour markets: insights from the ISIGrowth project” – has been devoted to disseminate the project results on the functioning of European labour markets.

The first paper “What if supply side policies are not enough? The perverse interaction of flexibility and austerity“, presented by Maria Enrica Virgillito, introduces an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of the labour market declined under two variants, a “Fordist” and a “Competitive” type of labour relations, focusing in understanding whether for the macro economy would be more beneficial to provide active labour market policies or demand management policies.

Moving toward the empirics, the second paper “Do firm-level pay agreements affect within-firm wage inequalities? Evidence across Europe”, presented by Federico Tamagni, provides a firm-level perspective on the effects that decentralization of wage bargaining exerts on within-firm wage dispersion across high and low paid workers and across managers versus low-layers employees..

Carrying on a cross-country European analysis, the third paper “Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the temporary employment-product innovation nexus”, presented by Valeria Cirillo, digs into the relationship between alternative types of labour contracts, i.e. different degrees of flexibility of the labour markets, and patterns of innovation and specialization of the industrial structure. The paper provides a cross-country European perspective, focusing on different technological regimes.

Finally, the fourth paper “The Local Distribution of Productivity Gains: Heterogeneous Effects“, presented by Maria Savona,

examines the effect of firm labour productivity changes on wages in the UK, particularly on low-paid occupations and low-skilled workers in local labour markets. The paper also examines the effect these changes have on the composition of local employment across a variety of occupations and skills.