This article analyzes changes in the occupational employment share in Spain for the period 1997 - 2012 and the way particular sociodemographic groups adapt to those changes. There seems to be clear evidence of employment polarization between 1997 and 2012 that accelerates over the recession....

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the family-friendly law (Act 39/99) approved in Spain in 1999, which grants parents the right to reduce work time schedule for childcare issues. We find an increase of work time reduction by around 18 %. Second, we find that employers restrict indefinite...

Internship contracts (ICs) were designed as a stepping stone for educated young workers to develop their professional skills upon graduation. Such contracts incentivise employment creation, as firms benefit from lower wages and tax reductions, but at the same time, firms are expected to develop...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a minimum income scheme (MIS) in the Basque Country, one of Spain's 17 autonomous regions. In particular, we assess whether the policy delays entry into employment for recipients, as well as the extent to which activating policies aimed at enabling...

Using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey (Encuesta de Poblacio´n Activa) from 1999 through 2007, we explore the role of employment opportunities in explaining the growing immigrant flows of recent years. Subsequently, we investigate whether immigrant inflows have helped reduce regional...

Youth unemployment has been on the rise since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Even more troublesome is the dramatic rise in the number of youth not in employment, education or training, which has led to widespread concerns about the impact on social cohesion and fears of a 'lost...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Using micro data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we first document how having a temporary contract in Spain is associated to lower levels of on-the-job training (OJT). Next, we find that this OJT gap is positively correlated with gaps in the...

This paper analyzes how changes in the firing-costs gap between permanent and temporary workers affect firms' TFP in a dual labour market. We argue that, under plausible conditions, firms' temp-to-perm conversion rates go down when this gap increases. Temporary workers respond to lower...