The quality of work during the employment crisis: the Italian case

The paper aims to study empirically the relationship between the effects of the employment crisis and the quality of work in Italy using a multidimensional approach. The quality of work is identified and measured through five dimensions. Such dimensions have been regressed, both for linear and quantile regression, for the ‘employment crisis’ variable, controlling for a set of variables including worker's characteristics, firm's variables, and job characteristics. The main findings show an uneven impact of the employment crisis on the quality of work dimensions. The employment crisis seems in fact to have significantly changed quality of work just in some of the dimensions. Moreover, the changes do not apply homogeneously in respect to both the sector of activity and the distribution of the examined dimensions.