Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

Family-friendly laws may backfire if not all workers with access to the policies use them. Because these policies are costly to the employer, hiring practices may consequently be affected at the detriment of the at-risk population who may end up accessing the policy. We exploit a 1999 Spanish...

Using data from Spanish Social Security records, we investigate the returns to experience in different flexible work arrangements, including part-time and full-time work, and permanent and fixed-term contracts. We use a trivariate random effects model which consists of a three-equation system...

Using rich panel data recently available from Spanish Social Security records, we find that a negative motherhood earnings differential of 2.3 log points remains even after controlling for both individual- and firm-level unobserved heterogeneity. The analysis of the mothers and childless women's...