In 2015, Italy has experienced the turning point of the economic crisis and has showed the first signals of economic recovery. At the same time, the number of permanent contracts has increased significantly.

In 2015, Italy has also adopted two labour market policies: the first is a generous temporary tax-relief of the labour costs which applies to all new permanent job contracts; the second is a revision of the rules which regulate terminations, aiming at reducing the uncertainty of firing costs for all the new permanent contracts (“contratto a tutele crescenti”, law 23/2015).

This paper aims at evaluating the occupational effects of the 2015 reforms on the labour market. The underlying hypothesis is that the increase in the number of permanent jobs which have started in 2015 is due both to the general increase in the economic trends, and to the labour market reforms.

Even though this paper is a first step of the analysis, to be explored in a deeper way, our estimates suggest that the labour market reforms have contributed to increase the share of new permanent contracts on the total number of new positions by 8 percentage points, about 762,000 new permanent jobs.