This paper examines the reasons why employers used and even increased their use of temporary help agencies during the tight labor markets of the 1990s. Based on case study evidence from the hospital and auto supply industries, we evaluate various hypotheses for this phenomenon. In high-skilled...

Laws in most West European countries give workers strong job rights, including the right to advance notice of layoff and the right to severance pay or other compensation if laid off. Many of these same countries also encourage hours adjustment in lieu of layoffs by providing prorated...

Like most Western European countries, Germany stringently regulates dismissals and layoffs. Critics contend that this regulation raises the costs of employment adjustment and hence impedes employers' ability to respond to fluctuations in demand. Other German labor policies, however, most...

We estimate the returns to seniority (the wage-tenure profile) for university faculty, and the degree to which these returns respond to entry-level salaries (or opportunity wages) a relationship unexplored in work to date. Using data on faculty at a Big Ten university (ours), we estimate...

Anti-poverty policy in the U.S. has emphasized labor supply policies, such as welfare reform or job training. Anti-poverty policy in the U.S. has not emphasized policies to increase labor demand for the poor, such as public employment or subsidizing private employers to hire the poor. What are...

Economists have traditionally had a keen interest in the effects of overall labor demand on the economic well-being of different population groups, particularly disadvantaged groups. The stronger the effects of overall demand on the economic well-being of the poor, the more support there is for...

Will welfare reform increase unemployment and reduce wages? The answer depends in part on how much welfare reform increases labor supply. This paper considers the labor supply effects of the welfare reforms that have occurred since 1993, when President Clinton entered office with a promise to...

To evaluate the effectiveness of self-employment assistance to the unemployed in Hungary and Poland more than 5,500 follow-up interviews were conducted in early 1997 by employees of local labor offices with persons in self-employment participant and comparison group samples. Wide ranging...

This paper presents estimates of the impact of retraining and public service employment (PSE) on reemployment and earnings in the Republic of Hungary during the early phase of post-Socialist economic restructuring. Since assignment to programs resulted in groups with vastly dissimilar...

To ease the hardship associated with worker dislocation and to maintain social stability during the transition to markets, the governments of Hungary and Poland provide labor force members with unemployment compensation and a variety of active labor programs (ALPs). Follow-up surveys of...