Search results for "Labour market flexibility"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
The Concept of Labour Market Flexicurity in the Eurozone
2013
This chapter discusses the evolution of the idea of a flexible labour market as a smooth shock absorber in case of asymmetric shocks. The concept of flexible labour markets became an institutionally well-established concept when the OECD constructed its index of labour market strictness. The OECD recognised, however, the weakness of its narrow approach and the European Commission put forward the more novel notion of flexicurity. Next, this chapter explains how the proposal of the concept of flexicurity aims at reaching a reasonable agreement between both the efficiency and the security principles by taking into consideration the interest of all the stakeholders in the labour market, includi…
UNEMPLOYMENT PERSISTENCE AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF EXCHANGE RATE PEGS
2010
Published in Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Volume 57, No. 1, February 2010: 85-102
Fiscal adjustments, labour market flexibility and unemployment
2014
Using a panel of 17 countries for 1978-2009, we find that tax-driven consolidations increase unemployment by 0.25 percentage points. Labour market flexibility mitigates this: a one-point rise in the flexibility index reduces youth (long-term) unemployment by 0.6-0.7 (1.8-2.2) percentage points.
Flexible Wage Contracts, Temporary Jobs, and Firm Performance: Evidence From Italian Firms
2013
This study focuses on the effects of decentralized wage schemes and temporary forms of employment on firm performance. The effect of monetary incentives on workers' effort and firm performance is a central topic in economics. According to the principal-agent paradigm, firms (the principal) have to link employees' remuneration schemes to any verifiable indicator of performance to avoid opportunistic behavior. The empirical evidence shows that financial incentives have the potential to exert strong effects on indicators of firm performance, such as productivity and worker absenteeism, although the degree of effectiveness of such schemes varies significantly according to the institutional/econ…
Identifying Resilient and Non-Resilient Labour Conditions in Europe Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis
2016
Based on the concept of labour market resilience, this paper is aimed to determine the combination of initial conditions behind resilient and non-resilient labour markets after the financial crisis in 2008 in Europe. We start from the assumption that some initial conditions in 2007 are crucial to achieve a specific labour result when a shock appears. In this sense, the effect of temporary employment in cyclical sectors, labour market flexibility, the level of education among the workforce, and the expenditure on Labour Market Policies (LMP) have been tested using crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) in 25 European countries. Whilst our results do not explain labour market resi…
Coping with Asymmetric Shocks in the EMU: The Role of Labour Market Flexibility
2013
The chapter discusses the economic conditions for the success of EMU when there is still a need for structural reforms in the markets of goods and services, and factors of production. In view of asymmetric shocks, experience shows that behaviour in nominal and real wage growth resulted in increased unemployment throughout the EU15. Fiscal policy, on the other hand, could mitigate to some extent the burden of wage adjustment, and could play an important role in improving productivity. In general, however, smooth shock-absorption requires a flexible wage formation process to circumvent low employment levels, but the risk of hysteresis would remain. To avoid the accumulation of wage and labour…