Mobility Lists and Re-employment: the Case of Female Workers in North East Italy

The Liste di mobilità (Mobility Lists) is an Italian labour market programme targeted to dismissed workers. It combines a ‘passive’ component granting monetary benefits to employees dismissed by firms larger than 15 employees, and an ‘active’ component providing an employment subsidy to any firm hiring workers from the Mobility Lists. Eligibility duration varies with the worker’s age at dismissal. Paggiaro et al. (2009) using a linked administrative panel data set for an Italian region, exploit the variability of these provisions to evaluate the impact of extending the duration of eligibility on re-employment probabilities over the 36 months subsequent to enrolment in the programme. The average treatment effect is identified via a Regression Discontinuity Design. Among the results, focusing on the subgroup of women, they found a negative impact for women entitled to monetary benefits at the end of the second year of eligibility that disappears one year later. In order to understand the reasons of this negative impact, in this article we integrate the administrative database with information on family composition coming from the archives of Ministry of Finance. The programme can be seen by women as a subsidized leave. Women entitled to longer monetary benefits can either decide to have another child or to take care of existing children. The decision is largely based on the opportunity cost of working. Our results support this interpretation.