Evolution of Instability on the French Labour Market during the Last Thirty Years

We use a 30-year longitudinal matched employer-employee database to describe the evolution of job stability by studying the duration of employment spells. The paper proposes two different perspectives aiming at describing and characterizing this evolution. Firstly, the analysis of survival rates and the modeling of the duration of the spells clearly show that instability increased in the last 30 years. Moreover there is a variety of situations depending on the characteristics of the employees and the firms. The increase in the instability is particularly strong in the first two years of the jobs. The youngest individuals are both the most unstable and the ones who have experienced the highest rise in instability. Executives are the most stable employees, and after a period of convergence between socio-occupational categories, the difference became larger, but in a different way among men and among women. The stability in service industry is lower than in other industries and it evolved in a less favourable way. In a second part, we study time-invariant heterogeneity at both firm and individual levels with a double fixed effects model. Our estimates suggest in particular that the younger the cohort, the more their individual instability and the more frequently they work in firms which do not keep their employees long. Moreover, office clerks and service workers are the less stable socio-occupational categories in terms of individual stability, while blue-collar workers are the ones who work in the firms that keep their employees for the shortest periods of time.