There is now ample evidence of a rise in ‘non-standard work arrangements’ in many industrialised economies, yet only rarely does theoretical and empirical work probe the question of why the risk of temporary employment varies. Focusing on temporary employment, the author extends the scope of...

Employers who use temporary agency staff in contrast to regular staff are not affected by employment protection regulations when terminating a job. Therefore, services provided by temporary work agencies may be seen as a substitute for regular employment. In this paper, we analyze the effects of...

Based on a new panel dataset created in close cooperation with one of the largest temporary help agencies (THAs) in Germany, this paper presents novel evidence on key aspects of temporary agency work, a segment of the labor market that despite its growing importance remains underresearched. In...

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...

We study immigrants in temporary employment agencies in Sweden using a unique data set that covers all aged 16-64 who were employed by temporary employment agencies (TEAs) in Sweden in November 1999, with information on their employment status in 1998 and 2000. We find that young people, women,...

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

During the 1990s, temporary agency work has increased rapidly in most OECD countries. We augment the equilibrium unemployment model developed by Pissarides and Mortensen with temporary work agencies. Our model implies that technological improvements for placements and de-regulation of the sector...