Facing a stochastic market wage, which is independent of their own hiring policy, employers offer contracts specifying fixed wage, revenue share and employment duration. In ongoing employment relations it depends on the treatment whether fixed wages can be only increased or also decreased. Will the uncertainty of the future market wage and less wage flexibility lead to temporary employment? And...

Labour as a Buffer: Do Temporary Workers Suffer? In this paper, we investigate whether or not there is an equal opportunities dimension to regulating equal pay and conditions for temporary work. We develop a “buffer stock” model of temporary work that suggests a number of reasons why ethnic minorities and women may be more likely to be on fixed-term contracts than comparable white males. Using ...

The paper presents a model that allows a unified analysis of sickness absence and search unemployment. Sickness appears as random shocks to individual utility functions, interacts with individual search and labor supply decisions and triggers movements across labor force states. The employed worker prefers absence for sufficiently severe sickness and the unemployed worker may prefer nonparticip...

We study the effects of diverse team composition on the survival and growth of new ventures using the Danish Linked Employer-Employee database. To get cleaner measures of diverse team composition, we focus on entrepreneurial dyads, and also investigate the asymmetric effects of team composition by distinguishing between the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’ founder. We complement existing work by s...

Recent theoretical models show that international trade can induce within-industry skillupgrading by raising R&D intensity and creating skill-biased technologies. This paper tests this assertion by estimating the effect of rising import shares on wage shares for 4-digit SIC US manufacturing industries. Using Arellano-Bond estimation to account for the endogeneity of imports, I find that neither...

Spatial and Temporal Aggregation in the Estimation of Labor Demand Functions The consequences of aggregation, temporal or spatial, for the estimation of demand models are theoretically well-known, but have not been documented empirically with appropriate data before. In this paper we conduct a simple, but instructive, exercise to fill in this gap, using a large quarterly dataset at the establis...

This paper examines the role of parents in helping children secure employment in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children’s employment with parent’s usefulness in job search. I find that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons (and not daughters), but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections for any of...

This paper explores the relationship between non-standard types of employment and mental health. The analysis uses data on workers from the first seven waves of the British Household Panel Study, 1991-97. Four different types of non-standard employment (nonstandard contracts, places, times, and weekly hours of work) are analysed and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) index is used as the me...

Making Work Pay for the Elderly Unemployed: Evaluating Alternative Policy Reforms for Germany We evaluate three policy reforms targeted at older unemployed people: (i) an hourly wage subsidy, (ii) an in-work credit, and (iii) a subsidy of social security contributions on low wages. The work incentive, labour supply and welfare effects of these hypothetical reforms are analysed on the basis a de...

Multiple Job Holding, Local Labor Markets, and the Business Cycle* About 5 percent of U.S. workers hold multiple jobs, which can exacerbate or mitigate employment changes over the business cycle. Theory is ambiguous and prior literature is not fully conclusive. We examine the relationship between multiple job holding and local unemployment rates using a large Current Population Survey data set ...