Since the 1980s, most advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets by reducing the protection against layoffs and introducing temporary and flexible contracts. Concurrently, ...a well-established economic stylized fact – the stability of the wage share of income – has been challenged as empirical evidence reveals a substantial decline in labour share across numerous countries. In this study, we aim to empirically investigate the causal link between these two phenomena by examining the impact of changes in the regulation of fixed-term contracts, as measured by variation over time in the temporary contracts EPL index, on the functional distribution of income. We employ Jordà’s local projection method for a panel of 18 advanced countries over the period 1985–2019 and show that reforms that deregulate fixed-term contracts consistently reduce the wage share.
•The wage share has declined in many countries in recent decades.•The study investigates the impact of fixed-term contract protection reforms on functional income distribution.•Local projections are applied to EPL variations for a sample of 18 advanced economies over the period 1985–2019.•A nonlinear analysis is conducted to explore the effects of flexibilization and tightening reforms.•The results indicate that deregulating fixed-term contracts leads to a significant reduction in the wage share.
The contribution investigates the need to provide an efficient system of active labour market policies for the autonomous workers too, and despite their heterogeneity, in order to give them the ...adequate support to stay and to overcome transitions in the labour market.
Most analyses of sexual orientation and earnings find that gay men face a wage gap, whereas lesbian women earn higher wages than similar heterosexual women. However, analyses rarely consider bisexual ...men and women as a unique group separate from other sexual minorities. I argue that such binary views of sexual orientation—treating sexual minorities as a homogenous non-heterosexual group—have obscured understandings of the impact of sexual orientation on labor market outcomes. Specifically, I predict that unequal outcomes for gay men and lesbian women are partly due to the influence of family arrangements and their effects on earnings. In contrast, I argue that bisexual men and women should be the most disadvantaged in the labor market, due to particularly disadvantaging stereotypes, perceptions of choice to their sexual orientation, and prejudicial treatment. Using data from the General Social Survey (N = 13,554) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 14,714), I show that family arrangements explain some of the observed earnings differentials for gay men and lesbian women. Bisexual men and women, in contrast, face wage penalties that are not explained by human capital differences or occupational characteristics. Perceptions of prejudicial treatment partially explain the observed wage gaps.
A survey of three refugee groups (ex-Yugoslavs, black Africans and people from the Middle East) in Western Australia indicates that the recent humanitarian arrivals are concentrated in labour market ...niches such as cleaning services, care of the aged, meat processing, taxi driving, security and building. Apart from the building industry, these employment niches are situated in the ‘secondary labour market’ comprising low-status and low-paid jobs that locals avoid. This article identifies several interrelated mechanisms through which the recent Australian refugee intake has been relegated to undesirable jobs: non-recognition of qualifications as a systemic barrier, discrimination on the basis of race and cultural difference by employers, ‘ethnic-path integration’ and the lack of mainstream social networks that could assist in the job search, and the recent ‘regional sponsored migration scheme’ through which the government tries to address the shortage of low-skilled labour in depopulating country areas. The data show massive loss of occupational status among our respondents and confirm the existence of the segmented labour market, where racially and culturally visible migrants are allocated the bottom jobs regardless of their ‘human capital’. Changes in the nature of the segmented labour market in the increasingly mobile global workforce are analysed. Some of these insights are drawn from two other research projects on Bosnian and Afghan refugees in Australia undertaken by the authors.
Types of Temporary Employment Ojala, Satu; Nätti, Jouko; Lipiäinen, Liudmila
Social indicators research,
07/2018, Letnik:
138, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This study aimed to find out how heterogeneous temporary employment is reflected in later labour market attachment. Using data from Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys in 1990, 1997 and 2003 merged ...with an 8-year register follow-up, we compared permanent workers with three categories of temporary employees: substitutes, common fixed-term (e.g. project workers), and periphery (seasonal, on-call, temporary agency and employment subsidy) workers. First, we applied sequence analysis to identify the main activities at the end of each follow-up year for all employees with permanent and temporary contracts. On this basis, we formed six typical employment sequence clusters. Second, we performed multinomial logistic regression to find out whether there are statistically significant differences between temporary and permanent employees in terms of how they are divided between the sequence clusters. Four in five permanent employees were in stable employment over the following 8 years, compared to only two in five temporary periphery workers. The corresponding proportion for substitute workers was 70% and for common fixed-term workers 64%. Compared to permanent workers, those in common fixed-term or periphery temporary employment were more likely to become unemployed, whereas substitute workers were not. Our major finding is that periphery employment clearly increases the risk of being edged out of the labour market through retirement, especially on disability pension.
This study presents robust evidence on the relationship between teacher pay and turnover using detailed panel data from Texas. While controlling for changes in district and local labor market ...characteristics, I estimate an overall turnover elasticity of −1.4 and show that the effect is largest for inexperienced teachers, declines with experience, and disappears around 19years of experience. Combining these results with what we know about the relationship between teacher value-added and experience, I show that paying teachers more improves student achievement through higher retention rates. The results also suggest that adopting a flat salary schedule may be a cheap way to improve student performance. I find no evidence that pay effects vary by the teacher's gender or subject taught.
•Increasing teacher pay reduces teacher turnover, primarily among less experienced.•Estimators robust to arbitrary changes in district and labor market characteristics.•Increasing teacher pay reduces turnover, which improves student achievement.
This article investigates the fiscal and welfare trade-offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid contributing by working informally. Using a life-cycle model of labor supply ...and saving decisions, I structurally estimate preferences and earnings opportunities in the formal and informal sectors using data on Chilean households. I find limited support for formal jobs rationing. Instead, mandatory pension contributions significantly encourage informality. Policy experiments show that Chile could lower minimum pension spending by 23%—while guaranteeing the same income to retirees—if the minimum pension's implicit tax rate was increased to 60%.
Using a representative sample of Chinese urban employees, we empirically study the impact of the utilization of informal job search through social networks on wage. We find a premium of initial wage ...associated with job referral, but the wage premium diminishes over tenure. We also find that the effect of job referral on initial wage reduces when human capital plays a more important role, or the recruitment process and the economic system are more market-oriented. Our findings are consistent with the learning theory that job referral can reduce information asymmetry between employees and employers at the beginning they meet, but the informational advantage diminishes over time as the employers know non-referred workers gradually.
The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional ...unemployment effects arise for administrative boundaries at the district level as they fail to adequately capture spatial processes. In addition, the nonstationarity of wages and unemployment is often ignored. Both issues are particularly important in high unemployment regimes like East Germany where a wage curve is difficult to establish. In this paper, labour market regions defined by economic criteria are used to examine the existence of an East German wage curve. Due to the nonstationarity of spatial data, a global panel cointegration approach is adopted. By specifying a spatial error correction model (SpECM), equilibrium adjustments are investigated in time and space. The analysis gives evidence on a locally but not a spatially cointegrated wage curve for East Germany.
•Spatial cointegration framework to study wage curve in East Germany.•Wage curve hypothesis valid for labour market areas, not for administrative districts.•Wage curve elasticity is higher if regional unemployment spillovers are considered.•Error-correction works within labour market regions, but not between the regions.•Findings call for a re-direction of public transfers in East Germany.
This article presents empirical evidence from household and firm survey data collected during 2009−2010 on the implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law and effects on China’s workers. The ...Government and local labor bureaus have made substantial efforts to enforce the provisions of the new Law, which has likely contributed to reversing a trend toward increasing informalization of the urban labor market. Enforcement of the Law, however, varies substantially across cities. The article analyzes the determinants of worker satisfaction with the Law’s enforcement, workers’ propensity to have a labor contract, their awareness of the Law’s content and their likelihood of initiating disputes, and finds that all are highly correlated with education level, especially for migrants. Although higher labor costs may have had a negative impact on manufacturing employment growth, this has not led to an overall increase in aggregate unemployment or prevented the rapid growth of real wages. Less progress has been made in increasing social insurance coverage, although signing a labor contract is more likely to be associated with participation in social insurance programs than in the past, particularly for migrant workers.
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