The unintended effects of increasing fixed-term employment on health

Abstract

This paper estimates the effect of the increasing role of fixed-term employment on workers’ health status in Italy. We use data from IT-SILC dataset, which includes workers’ responses in self-rated health over the period 2004-2009. We identify changes in self-rated health from the application after 2005 of the new rules concerning the fixed-term contracts and estimate the causal effect of their extension of applicability in the labour market. We show that the new fixed term regime explains the increase in poor health of workers, irrespective of the control group or the econometric model used.