Flexibility is recognized as one of the major shifts in the future of work. As emerging forms and structures of work challenge us to rethink how work is organized, specifically through the digitization of work by digital platforms, we are witnessing shifts in workplaces that challenge common...

Standard screening and core-periphery theories claim that temporary employment does not undermine the quality of permanent jobs. In contrast, organizational approaches suggest that firms use temporary contracts to pursue low-road employment strategies, which involve the creation of cheap and low...

Denmark is often highlighted as a "flexicurity" country with lax employment protection legislation, generous unemployment insurance, and active labor market policies. This model has coped with the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, avoiding large increases in long-term and structural...

Since the 1980s, most of the advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets by reducing protection against layoffs or introducing temporary and flexible contractual forms. Meanwhile, a stylized fact of economic theory has come undone, namely the stability of the wage...

We study how changes in labor market regulation may trigger firm adjustments in skill demand. Leveraging rich administrative data from Italy, we investigate the effects of a reform that reduced firing costs for permanent employees and tightened temporary contracts' regulation to increase job...

We combine matched employer-employee data with firms’ financial records to study a 2001 Italian reform that lifted constraints on the employment of temporary contract workers while maintaining rigid employment protection regulations for employees hired under permanent contracts. Exploiting the...

We develop a Dynamic-Stochastic-General-Equilibrium model to study the macro welfare effects of flexible labor contracts. Capturing the empirical properties observed in the data, we incorporate two labor sectors in our DSGE framework: a fixed sector and a flexible sector. The fixed sector offers...

Employees with a flexible contract, i.e., those with either a temporary contract, temporary agency workers, or those on a contract with flexible working hours, face more job and income insecurity than employees with a permanent contract. In competitive labor markets, they should be compensated...

With an ongoing energy transition, the electric network is increasingly challenged. Handling congestion is a major responsibility of network operators. In recent years, market-based approaches to utilize network-supportive exibility, especially local exibility markets (LFMs), have been discussed...

Using a novel database representing the near-universe of US online job postings, we examine the role of firms’ labor market power on financial flexibility and corporate policy. Validating our measure, within a county-occupation, high labor market power is associated with lower posted wages....

We present a quarterly narrative database of important labour market reforms in selected euro area economies in between 1995 and 2018 covering 60 events. We provide legal adoption and implementation dates of major reforms to employment protection legislation and unemployment benefits. Estimates...

We present a quarterly narrative database of important labour market reforms in selected euro area economies in between 1995 and 2018 covering 60 events. We provide legal adoption and implementation dates of major reforms to employment protection legislation and unemployment benefits. Estimates...

Only ten years ago, there were more internet users in countries like France or Germany than in all of Africa put together. But much has changed in a decade. The year 2018 marks the first year in human history in which a majority of the world's population are now connected to the internet. This...

This paper has three goals; first, to place U.S. job growth in international perspective by exploring cross-country differences in employment and population growth. This section finds that the U.S. has managed to absorb added workers -- especially female workers -- into employment at a greater...

We study how trade linkages affect the conduct of monetary policy in a two-country model with heterogeneous firms, endogenous producer entry, and labor market frictions. We show that the ability of the model to replicate key empirical regularities following trade integration---synchronization of...

Labour market flexibility is one of the main pillars of the European policy framework, as it is perceived as an instrument to promote growth with positive spillover effects on the workers’ income. The aim of this article is to investigate the effect of competition in the labour market on...

We develop a small open economy DSGE model to study the macro welfare effects of flexible labor contracts for an economy in a currency union. The framework exhibits two sectors: a fixed sector and a flex sector. The fixed sector offers contracts that exhibit rigidities in working-hours and wages...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...

We investigate how the flexibility of temporary contracts affects the probability of young workers to be upgraded into permanent employment. Theoretically, we explore the workers' career development in response to the change in flexibility within a search and matching model; empirically, we...

Within the past decades, employment precariousness has emerged as an alarming phenomenon afflicting labor markets across Europe. While the spread of job insecurity can be traced to specific mechanisms and processes triggered by recent macroeconomic developments, evidence shows how mainstream...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.’s zero-hours contract (ZHC) – a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows workers to decline any workload. We find quantitatively mixed welfare effects of ZHCs. On one hand they unlock job...

Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world and achieves this in combination with low inequality, low unemployment, and high income security. This performance is often attributed to the Danish labor market model characterized by what has become known as flexicurity. This essay describes...

We investigate herein whether the Balanced Labour Market Act (WAB) of 2020, which was intended to reduce the disparity between permanent and temporary employees in the Netherlands, has achieved its desired aim. Using a synthetic control method, we find that the introduction of the WAB led to the...

Temporary employment has become a salient feature of global employment pattern. However, few study has investigated the linkage between internationalization and temporary employment. This study addresses this gap by examining the impact of international trade on temporary employment and labor...

This paper examines how labor market flexibility affects the output effect of a public investment shock by using panel data from OECD countries. We identify the public investment shock as a public investment spending forecast error and employ the local projection method to estimate its effect on...

The empirical evidence on the association between labour market flexibility and R&D activities of firms is limited only to developed economies. In this research note, we examine the relationship between labour market flexibility and the R&D decisions of firms in India's organised Manufacturing....

Flexible work arrangements are on the rise in many countries, ranging from Germany's mini-jobs to UK's zero-hours contracts. These contracts allow for quick labor demand adjustments and are also seen as a way to discourage undeclared work, and more than 10 years ago Italy introduced what was...