Unemployment outflows: the relevance of gender, marital status and geographical location across three European countries

In this paper we adopt a three-state representation of the labour market (employment, unemployment, and inactivity). Using individual -level data from EU-SILC (European Union - Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) survey from three countries (France, Italy, Spain), we analyze the determinants of the moves from one labour market state to another at twelvemonths time distance. The three countries considered are, to some extent, similar under many respects: cultural, social, and economic (tight labour markets), so the paper is aimed at detecting differences in labour markets that may look similar at first sight. We focus on gender and marital status as potential sources of discrimination. We explore this, using a multinomial logit model that includes a series of variables as controls. Our main finding is that gender and marital status are indeed a source of discrimination in all the three countries but to different degrees and according to different patterns. Unemployed women have lower chances to find a job in Italy and Spain, but not in France. Anyway, in all the three countries women are more likely to loose their job when employed. Marriage plays an important, and positive, role only in Italy, where it mitigates the discrimination women are subject and it improves the situation also for males. It has an adverse effect in Spain, where married women are worse off than unmarried women, while its effect is limited in France.