Italian Labour Force Survey Research Articles

Small area estimation at provincial level in the Italian labour force survey

With regard to the Italian Labour Force Survey (LFS), this work presents the results of a research project aiming to find estimation methods which improve the reliability of the estimates at the level ofprovinces. The 95 provinces areplanned domains, within geographical regions, for which separate samples have been planned, designed and selected. We consider the following estimators:post-stratified ratio, Fay-Herriot andthree time series estimators which generalize the Fay-Herriot estimator. Furthermore, we develop two empirical analyses: the first is a comparative analysis by means o( a Monte Carlo simulation from a real time series obtained from bi-annual data of LFS; in the second analysis we develop a comparative study of the estimators using real bi-annual survey data and the estimates of MSE of estimators.

A double-hurdle labour supply model with fallible indicators of labour force state

We modify the formulation of a labour supply model with unemployment, to allow for measurement errors in some of the indicators used to operationally identify the labour force state of each individual. The resulting model consists of the combination of two models: (I) the model of interest is a reduced form bivariate Probit model, aimed at explaining jointly the participation/non-participation decision and the employment/ unemployment outcome; (II) to this model, we superimpose a fairly general and flexible measurement model, specifying how discrete indicators - obtained from responses to a relevant set of questionnaire items - measure the labour force states. We establish conditions for model identification, and present a sensible iterative strategy for obtaining ML estimates. Evidence from a sample of married women in the Italian Labour Force Survey corroborates the intuitively plausible notion that parameter estimates are highly sensitive to alternative ways of defining unemployment, and documents the advantages of the proposed model.

Youth unemployment duration from the Italian labour force survey: Accuracy issues and modelling attempts

Youth unemployment in the European Economic Community remains remarkably high, and very unevenly distributed across countries. In the EEC area 16.7% of the labour force aged 14-29 were unemployed in 1986. Among the five major Member countries, the youth unemployment rate varied markedly from 7.9% in Federal Republic of Germany to 25.6% in Italy and 38.4% in Spain.’ The level and variation in youth unemployment rates are of course related to the overall employment and unemployment situation. However, there is also clear evidence that in the various countries the burden of unemployment is shared very unequally among different age groups. The ratio of youth to adult unemployment rates is 1.3 for Germany, but raises to 3.2 for Spain and dramatically to 6.3 for Italy. From a slightly different perspective, the uneven distribution of the risks of unemployment for young people across countries is documented by the share of long-term unemployed, defined as those continuously out of work for a year or more. In 1986, the fraction of longterm unemployed in youth unemployment was below 40% in Germany, United Kingdom and France, but reached 59.7% in Spain and up to 67.7% in Italy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate opportunities and problems in using microdata from the quarterly Italian Labour Force Survey in a

L'indagine ISTAT sulle forze di lavoro: l'effetto del disegno

This paper reports results of a wide empirical study carried out in order to evaluate the design effect components of the Italian labour force survey sampling design. After a brief description of the sampling scheme, we introduce the post-stratified separate ratio estimator of a total and establish an interesting property of self weighting samples. Then we describe the empirical study developed using data from the 1981 demographic census in Umbria. The results concern the contribution of stratification, clustering, systematic selection, and post-stratification to the final design effect in estimating various labour force characteristics. At the end, some comments on the obtained results are given.

Modelling Job‐Search Duration from the Italian Labour Force Data

ABSTRACT: Micro (and possibly panel) data from the Labour Force Surveys are a valuable source for analysing the labour supply behaviour. Among the information collected by the quarterly Italian Labour Force Survey conducted by ISTAT (the Italian national statistical agency), there are data on the duration of job‐search.From a single survey, one can only know the duration of search up to the time of the interview. Nonetheless, by appropriately exploiting the longitudinal structure of the survey (the sample scheme is a rotated one, with a 50|X% overlapping of the sample units in two subsequent quarters) it is possible to measure, although imperfectly, some completed spells of job‐search.In this paper, we try to model the duration of job‐search for a sample of young unemployed. Considerable attention is devoted to the measure of duration of search, and to the evaluation of its accuracy. A one state proportional hazard model is specified and estimated, accounting also for unobserved heterogeneity.The model is estimated on a sample of young (15 to 29 years old) unemployed in January 1986 reinterviewed in April, in an Italian region (Lombardy).The major finding is a fairly clear evidence, both for males and females, of negative duration dependence, even after accounting for the unobserved heterogeneity that turns out to affect the female population.