Abstract

The «mobility lists» programme, mainly designed to support the income of workers in the event of collective redundancies, contains also important incentives to re-employment. The paper investigates the duration of unemployment in the lists using longitudinal data (unemployed workers enrolled in the lists for region Umbria between 1995 and 1998). Our data set differs from those used in previous research as it allows to identify 1) spells of fixed term employment during permanence in the lists 2) whether exit toward employment occurs as a recall from the previous employer or as a new job. Estimation of a competing risk model shows a strong negative duration dependence only for the recall hazard, while new jobs exhibit no duration dependence. The features of the process governing the recall hazard suggest the possibility of opportunistic behaviour by firms, with important implications for the design of the scheme