The Decline of the Temporary Worker: A Regional Perspective

Employment of temporary workers has been affected by new legislation in 2002 and the stabilisation of the economy in the early 21st century. These factors are hypothesised to reduce the overall level of temporary employment in the UK economy. To confirm this hypothesis, data from 28 Labour Force Survey (LFS) studies carried out between the periods of December 1997 and November 2004 were analysed alongside turnover data for the Employment Agency Industry. The results revealed a reduction of over a quarter of a million temporary workers in the UK Economy over 6 years. Qualitative interviews with ten large temporary worker employers confirmed that legislation and employers' preference for permanent workers reduced the demand for temporary workers. Nonetheless, regional differences were apparent with some regions such as Northern Ireland and Wales increasing their employment of temporary workers.     

Job Satisfaction and Contingent Employment

This paper analyses job satisfaction as an aggregate of satisfaction with several job aspects, with special focus on the influence of contingent-employment contracts. Fixed-effect analysis is applied on a longitudinal sample of Dutch employees in four work arrangements: regular, fixed-term, on-call and temporary agency work. Our results indicate that temporary agency work is the only contingent employment relation that is on average associated with lower job satisfaction compared to regular workers. Decomposition of this gap indicates that the major part is due to the low satisfaction experienced by agency workers regarding the content of their jobs. A lack of job security is also responsible for part of the gap. For fixed-term and on-call workers the negative satisfaction effect originating from the lack of job security and lower wages is compensated by other job aspects and a variant relationship between total job satisfaction and its components. However, male and high educated on-call workers do experience lower job satisfaction.     

Flexible Contracts and Human Capital Investments

As suggested by human capital theory, workers with flexible contracts participate less often in training than those with permanent contracts. We find that this is merely due to the fact that flexworkers receive less employer-funded training, a gap they can only partly compensate for by their own training investments. Flexworkers particularly participate less in firm-specific training that is meant to keep up with new skill demands than workers with permanent contracts. However, for those who participate in employer-funded firm-specific training, a temporary contract appears to facilitate the transition to a permanent contract with the same employer. However, this does not hold for participation in self-paid training. This training, which is usually general training, does not help in finding a better job.     

持久收入理论与我国城乡居民消费——基于省际面板数据的检验

本文运用基于持久收入和暂时收入的两种分解方法的省际面板模型检验了持久收入理论的三个假设。结果发现,我国城镇和农村居民消费与其持久收入均显著相关。我国城镇居民消费与其暂时收入显著相关;安徽、黑龙江、吉林、陕西、甘肃、青海、云南和海南等省农村居民的暂时收入的边际消费倾向等于零,而其他省份的不等于零。"λ假说"检验表明,我国城镇和农村居民消费对当期收入都是过度敏感的,导致PIH的局限性。选择误差修正项的绝对值表征不确定性和远期的流动性约束对城镇(或农村)居民消费的影响,计量结果显示,不确定性和远期的流动性约束对城镇(或农村)居民消费产生了明显的负面影响。农村居民的预防性储蓄动机强度大于城镇居民。     

Unintended consequences of China's new labor contract law on unemployment and welfare loss of the workers

China's new Labor Contract Law, which intended to strengthen the labor protection for workers, went into effect on January 1, 2008. The law stipulated that the maximum cumulative duration of successive fixed-term (temporary) labor contracts is 10 years, and employees working for the same employer for more than 10 consecutive years are able to secure an open-ended (permanent) labor contract under the new law, which is highly desirable to employees. However, in order to circumvent the new Labor Contract Law, some employers may have dismissed workers, after the passage of the new law, who had worked in the same firm for more than 10 years. Using data from the 2008 China General Social Survey, we find strong evidence that firms did in fact dismiss their formal-contract employees who have been employed for more than 10 years. Additionally, using a regression discontinuity design based on this exogenous change in unemployment status for this particular group of workers, we show that the dismissed workers suffered significant welfare loss in terms of happiness. Our results are robust to various specifications and placebo tests.     

Relationship regarding the demand for labor between domestic temporary and foreign workers: Korean case

With the progress of globalization, South Korea, one of the emerging industrial countries, has recently witnessed a sharp increase in the number of enterprises that employ foreigners. However, there are only a limited number of studies on the influence that such an increase has had on the labor market in the Republic of Korea. Thus, using ‘Workplace Panel Survey’ data surveyed by the Korea Labor Institute (KLI), this paper examines the relationship concerning the labor demand of an establishment between domestic temporary and foreign workers. Analysis using a bivariate Tobit model shows that a typical Korean firm attempts to employ domestic temporary and foreign workers simultaneously. Further, the empirical analysis found that any establishment that is relatively newly established and has difficulty in recruiting domestic workers hires foreign workers, but there is no evidence that establishments hire foreign workers rather than domestic temporary workers to save on the production cost.     

日本劳动市场雇佣形态的多样化及其存在的问题

20世纪90年代以来,随着社会经济环境的剧烈变化,日本的雇佣体制和劳动力市场发生了很大变化。终身雇佣理念被淡化,企业为了节约劳动成本,大规模缩减正式员工,并积极雇佣临时工。于是劳动力市场上出现了前所未有的多样化和流动化。这对企业来说,增加了雇佣的灵活性,但不利于长期发展;对劳动者来说,扩大了择业范围,但出现了和正式员工之间的待遇差距问题。     

What does a temporary help service job offer? Empirical suggestions from a Japanese survey

The aim of this paper is to test whether or not a temporary help service (THS) job benefits workers in Japan. By applying the average treatment effect on the treated estimation and its sensitivity tests to the Japanese survey data, we obtained the following findings. First, we observed no evidence that THS work has a positive impact on the probability of being permanently employed in subsequent waves, when compared to directly hired part-time jobs. Rather, THS workers suffer from a significantly higher probability of being unemployed, at least at some point over the next 2 years, than directly hired part-time workers do. At the same time, however, we also found weak evidence that THS workers have a lower probability of being unemployed than those who were originally unemployed. We conclude that THS work in Japan has failed to provide a stepping stone to permanent employment, although it may have provided employment opportunities to those who were otherwise unemployed.     

Brain drain,brain gain,and economic growth in China

We have used Chinese provincial data (1980–2005) to examine the effects of permanent and temporary emigration on human capital formation and economic growth in source regions. First, we find that permanent emigration is conducive to the improvement of both middle and high school enrollment. In contrast, while temporary emigration has a significantly positive effect on middle school enrollment it does not affect high school enrollment. Moreover, the different educational attainments of temporary emigrants have different effects on school enrollment. Specifically, the proportion of temporary emigrants with high school education positively affects middle school enrollment, while the proportion of temporary emigrants with middle school education negatively affects high school enrollment. Finally, we find that both permanent and temporary emigration has a detrimental effect on the economic growth of source regions.     

Unemployment duration and earnings of re-employed workers in urban China

The recent draconian program of labor retrenchment in China caused widespread unemployment. Many of the retrenched workers remained unemployed for a long time. How did the duration of their unemployment affect their re-employment earnings? The possible relationships between unemployment duration and subsequent wages are modelled heuristically, four explanations for a negative relationship being found. This hypothesis is investigated by means of a survey of workers in 13 Chinese cities, conducted in 2000. Re-employment earnings are found to decline as unemployment continues, an effect that is both statistically significant and quantitatively important. China's displaced workers face a tough labor market.     

Tattoos,Employment, and Labor Market Earnings: Is There a Link in the Ink?

The popularity of tattooing has increased substantially in recent years, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Moreover, tattooed images are permanent unless the individual opts for expensive, time consuming, and painful removal procedures. Given the increasing popularity of tattooing, and the permanent nature of this action, it is of interest to know whether tattooed workers are more or less likely to be employed and, conditional on employment, if they receive wages that are different from the wages of their non‐tattooed peers. To investigate these questions, we analyze two large data sets—from the United States and Australia—with measures of tattoo status, employment, earnings, and other pertinent variables. Regardless of country, gender, specific measures, or estimation technique, the results consistently show that having a tattoo is negatively and significantly related to employment and earnings in bivariate analyses, but the estimates become smaller and nonsignificant after controlling for human capital, occupation, behavioral choices, lifestyle factors, and other individual characteristics related to labor market outcomes. Various robustness checks confirm the stability of the core findings. These results suggest that, once differences in personal characteristics are taken into account, tattooed and non‐tattooed workers are treated similarly in the labor market. We offer suggestions for improving future surveys to enable a better understanding of the relationships between tattooed workers and their labor market outcomes.     

Employee Attitudes,Earnings and Fixed-Term Contracts: International Evidence

We explore the relationship between employee attitudes, earnings and fixed-term contracts using data from the British Social Attitudes Survey and International Social Survey Programme. We find that workers employed under such contracts receive significantly lower earnings than their permanent contract counterparts, even after controlling for a plethora of personal and job characteristics. This may be indicative of wage discrimination against fixed-term contract employees. Our results also allude to possible asymmetries in the role of education across this two-tier system, with educational attainment playing a more prominent signaling role in the case of ‘permanent’ contract employees. We also find significant evidence of attitudinal effects, with workers employed on permanent contracts more likely to be both satisfied and secure with their job, but also more likely to find work stressful and exhausting and, perhaps as a consequence, to engage in absence. JEL no. J24, J31, J33     

Dual Labour Market Intermediaries in Italy: How to Lay off “Lemons”—Thereby Creating a Problem of Adverse Selection

Using longitudinal data from the Bank of Italy that cover the period from 2004 to 2014, this paper investigates the wage- and career implications of temporary jobs across the entire wage profile via unconditional quantile regression models and dynamic panel probit models. Building on Autor’s contributions, we consider temporary jobs to be a Labour Market Intermediary that deals with job-matching problems, such as information asymmetries, search cost reductions, worker-side adverse selection, and pay-productivity gaps. Assuming that wage is a proxy for workers’ productivity, we examine the chances that temporary workers who are located in different quantiles of wage distribution have of making the transition towards a stable employment position in the primary labour market. Results clearly indicate that temporarily employed individuals suffer significant wage- and career penalties. Not only are these individuals overly concentrated in the lowest decile of wage distribution, but the career penalty associated with temporary jobs also remains stable independently of the wage/productivity quantile to which the workers belong. If firms use FTC or TWA at all, they do so to remove less productive workers, whose work contract is not renewed once expired. In light of this evidence, it is clear that the hypothesis—proposed in the economic literature—that temporary employment contracts might serve as a screening tool to identify the most productive workers who would then be offered a stable position in the primary labour market does not hold in the highly dualised labour market of Southern Europe.     

Conflict and compromise: Changes in U.S. strike outcomes, 1880 to 1945

Before about 1900, most strikes in the United States were either won or lost by the workers who called them. Relatively few strikes ended in any sort of compromise. Sometime during the last decade of the 19th century, however, the pattern begins to change, with the fraction of strikes ending in compromise peaking at nearly half during World Wars I and II. What explains these changes in strike outcomes between the late 19th century and 1945? We explore the effects of macroeconomic conditions, industrial organization and product markets, labor organization, law and public policy, and immigration and trade on the costs and benefits of achieving strike compromises. We find that temporary government intervention in settling strikes during World War I helped move labor and management away from an adversarial equilibrium, and thus allowed growing acceptance of organized labor to be reflected in a permanent increase in the rate of compromise. We conclude that changes in the nature of strike outcomes represent an important and neglected aspect of broader changes in the place of organized labor in the American political economy.     

Effects of Job Security Laws in a Shirking Model with Heterogeneous Workers

This paper explores the policy implications of job security laws. It extends Carter and De Lancey's (1997) efficiency wage model from the assumption of two types of workers to allow for infinite types of workers. One key difference between the models is that the proportion of nonshirking workers in equilibrium is an exogenous constant in their model, whereas it is an endogenous variable in this study. They find that a job security law increases the welfare of both shirkers and non-shirkers without reducing output. In this setting, it is shown that the law may increase the welfare of both shirkers and nonshirkers at the cost of lower output, or it may result in higher output, but the welfare effect of workers is uncertain.     

居住分层与农民工留城意愿:来自珠三角的证据

文章利用中山大学珠三角外来务工人员的问卷调查数据,运用Logit模型,对影响农民工留城意愿的因素进行实证分析。实证研究发现：居住分层中住房产权拥有程度与农民工的留城意愿显著正相关。个人租房比单位租房农民工的留城意愿高8.16个百分点,而自购住房比单位租房农民工的留城意愿高29.87个百分点。因此,推进城镇化过程中,应在尊重农民工留城意愿的基础上,重点通过完善阶梯式多层次居住模式和建立多元保障性住房供给系统等方式来实现其永久定居。     

Flexibility versus Commitment in Personnel Management

This paper compares human resources (HR) policies embedded in the Japanese and U.S. management systems. We adapt a model from the literature on irreversible investment and use it to examine the trade-off between flexibility to adjust the labor force and higher productivity stemming from the greater commitment of the firm to its employees. In the model, two types of contracts with otherwise identical workers can coexist. One possibility is for firms to commit to a permanent employment contract that precludes dismissal at will. The alternative is a temporary employment contract that allows flexibility to adjust the firm's labor force during demand downturns, but involves higher labor cost per unit of output. Using an example, we illustrate the possible magnitude of the value of flexibility and suggest that adopting long-term contracts in the wrong environment can significantly reduce firm value. The model yields predictions for the optimal labor force composition and its relation to the characteristics of the firm's market. We also consider practices that develop to complement permanent employment. The predictions are then examined in light of evidence on the HR practices in Japan and the United States in the past 50 years and are found to be consistent with the stylized facts in the literature. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 2001, 15(4), pp. 515–556. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois. © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA).Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J31, J33, J41, J64.     

Why Do Recent Graduates Enter into Flexible Jobs?

Flexible jobs make up a larger share of the Dutch labour market than in almost any other Western country. Recent graduates in the Netherlands are particularly likely to take flexible jobs. In this study we examine why recent graduates enter into temporary contracts and whether flexible jobs offer a poorer match for graduates’ qualifications than permanent jobs. We find that recent graduates that enter into flexible jobs face large wage penalties, a worse job match and less training participation than graduates who take permanent jobs, even after correcting for differences in ability. When the labour market situation for a particular field of education deteriorates, more recent graduates are forced into flexible jobs, threatening their position on the labour market in the long run. Flexible work among recent graduates is unrelated to their willingness to take risks. Only for university graduates is there any indication that flexible jobs may provide a stepping stone to permanent employment.     

Aging Workforce,Firm Productivity and Labor Costs in Korea: Are Older Workers Costly to Firms?

Are older workers costly to firms? This study aims to investigate the relationship between an aging workforce on firm productivity and labor costs using a unique Korean firm‐level panel dataset (WPS) covering the period from 2007 to 2011. The primary results show no evidence of a negative relationship between the proportion of older workers and firm productivity, and no significant relationship between the proportion of older workers and labor costs. In addition, the findings of this study implies that failure to account for unobserved firm heterogeneity and endogeneity of changes in age structure biases the results toward finding a correlation between the age structure of workers and firm productivity and labor costs. Consequently, there is a tendency to underestimate the true value of older workers for firms.     

人民币升值、热钱流入与房价的关系——基于趋势性和波动性的研究

本文对热钱流入与我国房价之间的相互关系和作用机制做出了分析。首先,验证了热钱流入规模与房屋销售价格指数之间的关联;然后,考虑到房价上涨包含持久性和暂时性两种类型,利用HP滤波方法将其分解成趋势成分和波动成分,进一步研究热钱和房价之间的相互作用机制。研究结果表明,房价上涨能够引起热钱流入,反过来热钱流入能够引起房价上涨;对于其相互作用机制,我们认为,房价上涨的趋势引起热钱流入,而热钱流入引起房价上涨的波动。这意味着,我国应该加强监测房价波动,稳定房价上涨趋势,以防止由此引起热钱流入进而对房价波动产生影响,最终避免对宏观经济产生冲击。