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The purpose of this paper is to study the factors affecting the return to work (RTW) of injured workers in an institutional setting where workers’ earnings are fully compensated during the disability period.

The authors use a unique data set matching employer-employee panel data with Italian workers’ compensation records. The authors estimate survival models accounting for workers’ unobserved heterogeneity.

Workers with higher wage growth, higher relative wages and from firms with better histories of stable employment, RTW sooner. More vulnerable workers – immigrants, females, members of smaller firms – also tend to return sooner. But even when we control for such measures of commitment, status, and job security, high-wage workers RTW sooner.

The authors use proxies as measures of commitment and status. The authors study blue-collar workers without finer job qualifications. The authors estimate a reduced form model.

In an institutional environment where the immediate cost of workers’ compensation benefits falls largely on firms, employers seem to pressure those workers whose time off is more costly, i.e., high-wage workers. The lack of evidence of ex post moral hazard behavior also demands for a better understanding of the relationship between benefits and RTW.

Workers who are induced to RTW before full recovery jeopardize their long- term health and employability. Firms that put such pressure on employees might generate social costs that can be particularity high in the case of high productivity workers.

The paper offers the first quantitative analysis of an institutional setting where injured workers face 100 percent benefits replacement rate and have job security. This allows focus on other workers’ or employers’ reasons to speed RTW. It is one of very few economics studies on this topic in the European context, providing implications for human resource managers, state regulators, and unions.

This paper seeks to explore whether temporary jobs are a port of entry into permanent employment and to argue that the answer crucially depends on the type of temporary contracts being considered.

The paper bases its empirical evidence on a longitudinal sample of labour market entrants in Italy and estimates dynamic multinomial logit models with fixed effects to allow for the non‐random sorting of workers into the different types of contracts.

The authors show that the transition to permanent employment is more likely for individuals who hold any type of temporary contract than for the unemployed, thus broadly confirming the existence of port‐of‐entry effects. Yet, not all temporary contracts are the same. An order among non‐standard contracts with respect to the probability of taking an open‐ended job emerges, with training contracts at the top, freelance work at the bottom, and fixed‐term contracts outperforming apprenticeships. Strong SSC rebates, lack of training requirements, and low legal constraints concerning renewals result in poor port‐of‐entry performance, as in the case of freelance contracts. Instead, mandatory training and more binding legal constraints on the use, extension, and renewals of training contracts tend to enhance the probability of getting a standard job.

Most of the existing empirical literature aggregates temporary contracts in a single category, thereby ignoring a relevant source of heterogeneity.