As immigrants born in developing countries and their descendants represent a growing share of the working-age population in the developed world, their labour market integration constitutes a key factor for fostering economic development and social cohesion. Using a granular, matched...

This study examines the potential impact of works councils and unions on the deployment of fixed-term contracts and agency temps. We report inter al. that works councils are associated with a higher number of temporary agency workers when demand volatility is high while the opposite holds for...

This paper is one of the first to estimate how the region in which an establishment is located affects its productivity, wage cost and cost competitiveness (i.e. its productivity-wage gap). To do so, we use detailed linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium and rely on methodological...

Using Portuguese data, this paper investigates the effects of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and of job-finding methods on earnings. The effectiveness of the job search process is also evaluated in terms of the periodicity of the resulting job match. Emphasis is accorded...

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states, namely, inactivity and employment. The major innovation is our recognition of defective risks. We first use a polynomial hazard function to test for the presence of...

A thorny problem in identifying the determinants of reservation wages and particularly the role of continued joblessness in their evolution is the simultaneity issue. We deploy a natural control function approach to the problem that involves conditioning elapsed duration on completed...

Using international data, we investigate whether the quality of industrial relations matters for the macro economy. We measure industrial relations inversely by strikes -- which proxy we cross-check with an industrial relations reputation indicator -- and our macro performance outcome is the...

We investigate how the wage distribution differs among small and large establishments in four European countries. Findings show that within-establishment wage dispersion rises with size because large employers have a more diverse workforce. They also suggest that screening and monitoring costs...

We provide first evidence regarding the direct effect of educational norms and educational mismatch on the bottom line of firms across work environments. To do so, we use rich Belgian linked employer-employee panel data, rely on the methodological approach pioneered by Hellerstein et al. (1999),...