All industrialized countries have Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) for permanent workers and Restrictions on the use of Temporary Employment (RTE). The (ambiguous) effects of these on the levels of employment and unemployment have been extensively studied, but nothing is known empirically...

Focusing on the cost-reducing motive behind the use of temporary agency employment, this paper aims at providing a better theoretical understanding of the effects of temporary agency work on the wage-setting process, trade unions' rents, firms' profits and employment. It is shown that trade...

Focusing on the cost-reducing motive behind the use of temporary agency employment, this paper aims at providing a better theoretical understanding of the effects of temporary agency work on the wage-setting process, trade unions' rents, firms' profits and employment. It is shown that trade...

Using European Community Household Panel data for nine countries for 1996-2001, I investigate the impact of reforms of employment protection systems on employment and on temporary jobs for wage and salary workers. Individual fixed effects models are estimated, with the inclusion of...

Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...

This paper provides a simple model which explains the choice between permanent and temporary jobs. This model, which incorporates important features of actual employment protection legislations neglected by the economic literature so far, reproduces the main stylized facts about entries into...

Although the negative economic effects of temporary employment are widely discussed, cross-country research on firms' demand for temporary employment is rare. National studies indicate that workload fluctuations are one major motive for firms to employ temporary workers. By studying a novel data...

We construct indicators of the perception of job security for various types of jobs in 12 European countries using individual data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We then consider the relation between reported job security and OECD summary measures of Employment Protection...

Using a country-industry panel dataset (EUKLEMS) we uncover a robust empirical regularity, namely that high-risk innovative sectors are relatively smaller in countries with strict employment protection legislation (EPL). To understand the mechanism, we develop a two-sector matching model where...

The diffusion of Temporary Work Agency (TWA) jobs originated a harsh policy debate and ambiguous empirical evidence. Results for the US, based on quasi-experimental evidence, suggest that a TWA assignment decreases the probability of finding a stable job, while results for Europe, based on the...