Duration of maternity leave in Germany: A case study of nonparametric hazard models and penalized splines

The paper investigates maternity leave behavior in West Germany for females being employed between 1995 and 2006 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The observational study focuses on the investigation of individual and family-related covariate effects on the duration of maternity leave following first or second childbirth, respectively. Dynamic duration time models are used in which covariate effects are allowed to vary smoothly with duration of being in maternity leave. The intention of the paper is to demonstrate with state of the art models how effects of covariables change over time and to analyse substantial differences between maternity leaves following first and second childbirth. Particularly the personal income of mothers and the educational attainment influence the decision when to return into employment. The leave period following second birth is influenced by the mothers' attachment to the labour market between their two maternity leave periods. As fitting routine penalized spline smoothing effects is employed using available software in R (http://www.r-project.org).     

The Sorting of Female Careers after First Birth: A Competing Risks Analysis of Maternity Leave Duration

A number of contributions have found evidence that motherhood is a critical life event for women's employment careers. This study presents a detailed analysis for the duration of maternity leave in which young mothers can make a transition into different types of employment, unemployment as well as the next birth. We provide a comprehensive picture of the sorting mechanisms that lead to the differentiation of women's employment careers after birth. Our empirical evidence is derived from large‐linked administrative individual labour market data from Germany for a period of three decades. We obtain unprecedented insights into how women's skills, the quality of the previous job match, firm level characteristics, labour market conditions and leave legislation are related to the length of maternity duration. Expansionary leave policies, e.g. are found to be a key factor for the rising share of women who have their second child out of inactivity.     

Unemployment insurance and job turnover in Spain

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the potential relationships between the unemployment insurance system and labour market turnover. This study assumes the incentives embedded in the unemployment insurance system have a heterogeneous impact, depending on the type of labour market transition (quits versus layoffs and recalls versus new job entrances) and on a worker's attachment to the labour market (gender and type of contract). The layoff hazard rate increases as workers qualify for unemployment benefits, whilst the quit hazard rate remains stable. Similarly, employment inflow increases sharply after the exhaustion of unemployment benefits. The timing and importance of the exit differ between recalls and new job entry and depend on a worker's attachment to the labour market. The results show that unemployment benefits appear to favour job turnover and both firms' and workers' decisions seem to matter.     

Employment effects of extended geographic scope in job search

This paper uses a unique possibility to link unemployed individuals' stated willingness to move for work with administrative data, giving us the possibility to analyse the effects of individual willingness-to-move on labour market outcome. Those with extended geographic job search area have a higher probability of finding a job. However, the greatest effect is found on the local labour market, indicating that it is not the extended geographic scope per se that increases the likelihood of escaping unemployment, but differences in unobservable characteristics between those who use an extended search area and those who do not.     

Land Market Restrictions,Women's Labour Force Participation and Wages in a Rural Economy

We analyse the effects of land market restrictions on the rural labour market outcomes for women. The existing literature emphasizes two mechanisms through which land restrictions can affect economic outcomes: collateral value of land, and (in)security of property rights. Our analysis focuses on an alternative mechanism where land restrictions increase costs of migration out of villages. Testable prediction of collateral channel is that wages remain unchanged, but the effects on labour force participation are ambiguous. Insecurity of property rights in land reduces labour force participation, but leaves wages undisturbed. In contrast, if land restrictions work primarily through higher migration costs, labour force participation increases, while wages decline. For identification, we exploit a natural experiment in Sri Lanka where historical malaria played a unique role in land policy. We provide robust evidence of a positive effect of land restrictions on women's labour force participation, but a negative effect on female wages. The empirical results thus contradict a collateral or insecure property rights effect, but supports migration costs as the primary mechanism.     

Dilemmas in the management of temporary work agency staff

Temporary jobs account for an increasing proportion of new engagements in the UK labour market, with temporary work agencies or 'labour market intermediaries' occupying a central role in the regulation of entry into some organisations. Such evolving arrangements have been found to have their contradictions, even for the host organisation. This article explores the internal and external pressures to use a temporary work agency as a means of recruiting labour at host organisations. It considers some of the HRM issues that stem from the use of such workers, including the tendency to devolve HRM to the managers of such agencies operating within the host organisation. Central to this article is a consideration of the potential sustainability of organisations' use of temporary agency workers, engaging with this concern from the perspective of organisational cost‐effectiveness.     

The impact of EU accession on Turkish industrial relations and social dialogue

This article examines whether the European Union membership process is transforming the ‘deep structure’ of Turkish industrial relations. We make an attempt to illustrate this through the prism of Turkish experience in social dialogue regarded as an indispensable tool of the European social model. Turkish industrial relations is characterised by restrictive labour laws, employer hostility to unionisation, a large informal economy and labour market, and strong state intervention, which have historically constituted the main elements of ‘the deep structure’ of Turkish industrial relations. In procedural terms, the institutions for social dialogue have been established but the influence of the social partners is limited because of the dominance of the state and the weakness of labour. The existing attempts at developing social dialogue rest on shaky foundations emanating mostly from the state's and employers' disrespect of basic labour rights.     

Incentives to work? The impact of a ‘Cash-for-Care’ benefit for immigrant and native mothers labour market participation

To what extent is labour market participation of mothers sensitive to economic incentives? We answer this question by studying the effect on labour market participation of a Norwegian family policy programme that clearly has affected the incentives to participate in the labour market of mothers with small children. From January 1999, all parents with one- and two-year-old children who did not use publicly subsidised day-care became entitled to a benefit, ‘Cash-for-Care’ (‘CFC’). The CFC reform has increased the price of publicly subsidised day-care relative to the price of own care. Economic theory of labour market participation postulates that the CFC reform would have a negative effect on labour market participation for the person most involved in childcare. The results show that the CFC reform has affected mothers' labour market participation negatively. The effects are much stronger for non-western immigrant mothers' than for native mothers. The results support the hypothesis that non-western immigrant mothers do react to changes in the relative prices of childcare and suggests that non-western female immigrants are quite responsive to changes in economic incentives.     

Educational mismatch,wages, and wage growth: Overeducation in Sweden, 1974–2000

We examine the impact of educational mismatch on wages and wage growth in Sweden. The empirical analyses, based on cross-sectional and panel data from the Level of living surveys 1974–2000, are guided by two main hypotheses: (a) that educational mismatch reflects human capital compensation rather than real mismatch, and (b) that educational mismatch is real but dissolves with time spent in the labour market, so that its impact on wages tends toward zero over a typical worker's career. Our findings do not support these hypotheses. First, significant differences in contemporaneous economic returns to education across match categories remain even after variations in ability are taken into account. Second, we find no evidence that the rate of wage growth is higher among overeducated workers than others. Our conclusion is that the overeducated are penalized early on by an inferior rate of return to schooling from which they do not recover.     

Population,labour force and unemployment in Andalusia: prospects for 1993

"This paper is concerned with forecasting population, employment, labour force and unemployment in Andalusia [Spain] to 1993. For this purpose, a block-recursive demoeconomic model is presented. The demographic submodel is based on the component-cohort method of forecasting population by age and sex. The economic submodel uses econometric and time series analysis to forecast employment both in the medium and short-term. In the labour market part, the labour force is forecasted taking into account the encouraged-discouraged worker effects of changes in the demand for labour."     

Property Rights Reform to Support China's Rural–Urban Integration: Village‐Level Evidence from the Chengdu Experiment

As part of a national experiment, in 2008, Chengdu prefecture launched a series of property rights reforms, among them complete registration of all land and measures to ease transferability and eliminate labour market restrictions. A comparison of villages inside and outside the prefecture's border using a difference‐in‐difference approach suggests that the reforms have reduced administrative reallocations; aligned land use closer to economic incentives, mainly through market transfers; and stimulated enterprise startups. These results, most of which are more pronounced for villages closer to Chengdu city, illuminate the potential gains from factor market reform.     

Household Shocks and Education Investments in Madagascar

This paper investigates the impact of exogenous shocks to household income, assets and labour supply on children's school attendance in Madagascar. The analysis uses a unique data set with 10 years of recall data on school attendance and household shocks. We find that the probability of a child dropping out of school increases significantly when the household experiences an illness, death or asset shock. We propose a test to distinguish whether the impact of shocks on school attendance can be attributed to credit constraints, labour market rigidities, or a combination of the two. The results suggest that credit constraints, rather than labour market rigidities, explain the inability of households in Madagascar to keep their children in school during times of economic stress.     

Costs and benefits of Danish active labour market programmes

Since 1994, unemployed workers in the Danish labour market have participated in active labour market programmes on a large scale. This paper contributes with an assessment of costs and benefits of these programmes. Long-term treatment effects are estimated on a very detailed administrative dataset by propensity score matching. For the years 1995 – 2005 it is found that private job training programmes have substantial positive employment and earnings effects, but also public job training ends up with positive earnings effects. Classroom training does not significantly improve employment or earnings prospects in the long run. When the cost side is taken into account, private and public job training still come out with surplusses, while classroom training leads to a deficit.     

Connecting Time and Space: The Significance of Transformations in Women's Work in the City

Growing numbers of women with children living in western cities are entering the labour market, raising new questions about changes in the allocation of the tasks of social reproduction between household members and others and about the effects of the increasing time women now spend in the workplace. As Manuel Castells noted over 25 years ago, women's unpaid labour has long been essential, not only in the domestic arena, but also in patching together facilities separated in space. The spatial layout of cities, with its specialized and segregated land‐uses, only works, he argued, if women's unpaid labour is available to connect urban locations. But many women now spend many more hours in the labour market, replacing their former domestic labour with a range of commodified goods and services as well as by help from a range of related or unrelated others, sometimes but not always remunerated and/or by state‐provided or supported services. This article examines the consequences of the growth of women's employment in Britain and the concomitant decline of the old breadwinner family, the growth of workfare policies that assume all individuals are available for waged work and the rise of commodified caring. The arguments are illustrated by empirical examples from interviews undertaken with middle‐class mothers in waged work in London and Manchester in the UK.     

INSTITUTIONS AND PERFORMANCE IN EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKETS: TAKING A FRESH LOOK AT EVIDENCE

Abstract This paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical EU‐based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment. Although the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as exogenous, attention shifted recently towards understanding the underlying causes of specific institutional arrangements. As a consequence, the literature highlights the great importance of an efficient policy design exploiting these interactions wisely and identifies general principles for achieving an efficient policy design at both macro and micro levels. Although empirical evidence does not show a major change in terms of intensity of labour market reform after the setting of the Economic and Monetary Union and the creation of the euro, the reforms aiming at strengthening the labour market attachment of vulnerable groups tend to have been successful both in raising their employment and increasing labour market adjustment.     

Money,markets, meltdown: the 21st‐century crisis of labour

Analyses of the global crisis that erupted in 2007 in bank failures, liquidity shortages and business bankruptcies have obscured the connections between the real and monetary economies. Money market fetishism dominates. In the past, theories of economic crisis assigned a key causal role to labour's growing strength. In Britain, the focus of debate was trades unions' allegedly unregulated power at workplace level, but labour's presence and influence in state, business and workplace institutions has since receded. This article attempts to re‐insert labour into the contemporary analysis of the crisis and highlights the shifting relations between states, capital and labour in the age of austerity.     

Incomplete information and the time series behaviour of consumption

Pischke ( 1995 ) uses both microeconomic and macroeconomic US data to test the idea that, within an otherwise standard PIH framework, ignorance by agents of aggregate labour income can account for the observed degree of excess smoothness and sensitivity in consumption. His tests involve only the second moments of aggregate consumption and labour income. In this paper our main aim is to identify and test the restrictions his model implies for aggregate consumption dynamics, using US quarterly data over the period 1959–1996, but our framework allows us also to test an earlier, related model of Goodfriend ( 1992 ). We find that both models can be formally rejected: ignorance of aggregate labour income cannot by itself account for aggregate consumption dynamics; some other relaxation of the assumptions of the standard PIH is required. We give an example of one possible such relaxation and present evidence indicating that Pischke's version of imperfect information may, within that framework, have a significant role to play. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The operation and management of agency workers in conditions of vulnerability

This article focuses on the operation and management of agency labour by employers and observes that there are strong contradictions between the employers' stated reasons for using agency labour and the employment agencies' perceptions of why such labour is utilised. While discussing agency labour generally, the article also takes account of the position of migrant workers within the agency sector, since agencies have represented a significant route into employment for migrant labour. It draws primarily on 22 in‐depth interviews with employers and employment agencies mainly in the food processing, cleaning and care sectors. The research revealed that while some employers were using agency staff to cover for specific peaks in production, others had used it as an alternative method of dealing with vacancies that otherwise might have resulted in permanent employment.     

The transition from individual to collective labour relations in China

The article discusses the current transformation of Chinese labour relations. The Labour Contract Law implemented in 2008 provided the legal framework for China's adjustment to individual labour relations; it also hastened the evolution of collective labour relations. The article discusses how two different aspects of the Chinese labour movement—top‐down and bottom‐up—have been interacting. Implications are drawn from the experience of the strike wave of the summer of 2010. It is argued that further legal intervention could facilitate the development of China's labour policy, but that the reform of collective labour law will require the strengthening of the collective rights of workers and the nurturing of institutions which can focus collective consciousness and organisation.     

Monopsonistic competition for the “best” workers

In this paper we analyse an economy where firms use labour as the only production factor, with constant return to scale. We suppose that jobs differ in their non-wage characteristics so each firm has monopsonistic power. In particular, we suppose that workers are heterogeneous with respect to their productivity. Then, each firm has incentives to offer higher wages in order to recruit the most productive workers. Competition among firms leads to a symmetric equilibrium wage, which is higher than the reservation wage, and to involuntary unemployment for the less productive workers, who are willing to work at the current wage but are not hired because their productivity is lower than the wage level. If firms have no institutional constraint on paying lower wages for the same job, an endogenous labour market segmentation emerges.