  In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a reform introduced in Italy in 2018
(Decreto Dignit\`a), which increased the rigidity of employment protection
legislation (EPL) of temporary contracts, rolling back previous policies, to
reduce job instability. We use longitudinal labour force data from 2016 to 2019
and adopt a time-series technique within a Rubin Casual Model (RCM) framework
to estimate the causal effect of the reform. We find that the reform was
successful in reducing persistence into temporary employment and increasing the
flow from temporary to permanent employment, in particular among women and
young workers in the North of Italy, with significant effects on the stocks of
permanent employment (+), temporary employment (-) and unemployment (-).
However, this positive outcome came at the cost of higher persistence into
inactivity, lower outflows from unemployment to temporary employment and higher
outflows from unemployment to inactivity among males and low-educated workers.
