Understanding Recent Developments in the Turkish Labor Market: Empirical Essays with a Gender Focus

This dissertation comprises three essays on the Turkish labor market. The first essay characterizes the distinctive characteristics of the Turkish labor market with the aim of understanding the factors lying behind its long-standing poor performance relative to its European counterparts. The analysis is based on a cross-country comparison among selected European Union countries. Among all the indicators of labor market flexibility, non-wage cost rigidities are regarded as one of the most important factors in slowing down employment creation in Turkey. The second essay focuses on an employment subsidy policy which introduces a reduction in non-wage costs through social security premium incentives granted to women and young men. Exploiting a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, I evaluate the effectiveness of this policy in creating employment for the target group. The results, net of the recent crisis effect, suggest that the policy accounts for a 1.4% to 1.6% increase in the probability of being hired for women aged 30 to 34 above men of the same age group in the periods shortly after the announcement of the policy. In the third essay of the dissertation, I analyze the labor supply response of married women to their husbands' job losses (AWE). I empirically test the hypothesis of added worker effect for the global economic crisis of 2008 by relying on the Turkey context. Identification is achieved by exploiting the exogenous variation in the output of male-dominated sectors hard-hit by the crisis and the gender-segmentation that characterizes the Turkish labor market. Findings based on the instrumental variable approach suggest that the added worker effect explains up to 64% of the observed increase in female labor force participation in Turkey. The size of the effect depends on how long it takes for wives to adjust their labor supply to their husbands' job losses.

Formazione e Competenze Professionali: una ricerca empirica sui Cassaintegrati in deroga della regione Emilia Romagna

The general theme of the present inquiry concerns the role of training and continuous updating of knowledge and skills in relation to the concept of employability and social vulnerability. The empirical research has affected the entire calendar year 2010, namely from 13 February 2010 to December 31, 2010: data refer to a very specific context or to the course funded by the Emilia Romagna region and targeted to employees in cassintegrazione notwithstanding domiciled in the region. The investigations were performed in a vocational training scheme accredited by the Emilia Romagna for the provision of publicly funded training courses. The quantitative data collected are limited to the region and distributed in all the provinces of Emilia Romagna; It addressed the issue of the role of continuing education throughout life and the importance of updating knowledge and skills, such as privileged instruments to address the instability of the labor market and what strategy to reduce the risk unemployment. Based on the different strategies that the employee puts in place during their professional careers, we introduce two concepts that are more common in the so-called knowledge society, namely the concept of social vulnerability and employability. In modern organizations becomes relevant knowledge they bring workers and the relationships that develop between people and allowing exponentially and disseminate such knowledge and skills. The knowledge thus becomes the first productive force, defined by Davenport and Prusak (1998) as "fluid combination of experience, values, contextual information and specialist knowledge that provides a framework for the evaluation and assimilation of new experience and new information ". Learning at work is a by stable explicit and conscious, and even enjoyable for everyone, especially outside of a training intervention. It then goes on to address the specific issue of training, under the current labor market increasingly deconstructed.