Over the past three decades Germany has repeatedly deregulated the law on temporary agency work by stepwise increasing the maximum period for hiring-out employees and allowing temporary work agencies to conclude fixed-term contracts. These reforms should have had an effect on the employment...

Is there a reward for basic skills in the German labor market? To answer this question, we examine the relationship between literacy, numeracy and monthly gross earnings of full-time employed workers. We use data from the ALWA survey, augmented by test scores on basic cognitive skills as well as...

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index of hierarchical distance to the ultimate...

Social networks may affect workers' labor market outcomes. Using rich spatial data from administrative records, we analyze whether the employment status of neighbors influences the employment probability of a worker who lost his job due to a plant closure and the channels through which this...

This paper evaluates the impact on temporary agency workers' job satisfaction of a reform that considerably changed regulations covering the temporary help service sector in Germany. We isolate the causal effect of this reform by combining a difference-in-difference and matching approach and...

Temporary agency employment has grown steadily in most European countries over the past three decades as part of the general trend towards increased employment flexibility. Yet to this day, it remains an open question what drives the demand for temporary agency workers. The paper examines,...

We perform a comprehensive analysis of the stepping-stone effect of temporary agency employment on unemployed workers. Using the timing-of-events approach, we not only investigate whether agency employment is a bridge into regular employment but also analyze its effect on post-unemployment wages...

It is a well-known fact that temporary agency workers have to accept high pay penalties. However, remarkably little is known about the remuneration of workers who are frequently employed in this sector or who are employed for a substantial length of time. Based on a rich administrative data set,...

We investigate the labor market effects of immigration in Denmark, Germany and the UK, three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states. Institutions such as collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection and...

This paper fills a gap in the literature by investigating whether temporary agency employment substitutes regular employment. To take into account the interaction between the two employment forms, we identify a SVAR model with correlated innovations by volatility regimes. We show that a positive...