Since 2003 the German Public Employment Service has been experimenting with the contracting out of various services. One of the new labour market programmes is Personnel Service Agencies, which provide client firms with jobseekers on a temporary assignment basis and are responsible for...

This paper examines the changes of the degree of job absorption over time in job categories of Engineering, Computer Sciences, Business Administration and General subjects. We estimated a time-delay index explaining time-delay to get the first job after completing studies in the respective...

The entrance of young people in the labour market at older ages than in the past is correlated to the increased trend in education. Both these changes, the delay in entrances and the increase in the number of years spent at school, are much more marked in the case of women. One additional school...

This paper studies a dynamic model with efficiency wages and adjustment costs associated with hiring and firing decisions. With linear adjustment costs, the optimal efficiency wage and employment are affected by the real interest rate and adjustment costs. When lumpy costs or convex adjustment...

This paper provides a socio-psychological theory of efficiency wage growth. The model blends agency theory with the Forced Savings hypothesis by assuming that firms set an increasing wage profile to minimize shirking costs, and that workers’ effort is positively related to the variation of...

Unemployment durations are determined by a number of factors. According to mainstream economics theory, unemployment durations are shorter in a more flexible labour market. In this paper, we hypothesize that workers who had a temporary contract before the spell of unemployment will experience...

In this article, we study the impact of temporary employment (TE) on productivity and, in particular, we wonder if it differs according to sectors skill intensity. Our data set is an ad-hoc industry-level panel of European countries, which allows to deal with endogeneity problems. Our main...

This paper presents the first joint evaluation of the two major labour market reforms implemented in Spain to foster permanent employment in 1994 and 1997. The 1994 reform restored the principle of causality in the application of temporary contracts and the 1997 reform introduced a new permanent...

The European Union is strongly promoting the adoption of renewable energy sources (RES). This policy relies mostly on environmental reasons, but its promoters also claim that RES subsidies will result into the creation of a significant number of jobs. This papers takes into examination the case...