Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTThis paper uses a unique Portuguese dataset to examine the effect of access to unemployment benefits (UBs) and their maximum potential duration on escape rates from unemployment. In examining the time profile of transitions out of unemployment, the principal contributions of the paper are twofold. First, it provides a detailed state space of potential outcomes: open‐ended employment, fixed‐term contracts, part‐time work, government‐provided jobs, self employment, and labour force withdrawal. Second, it is able to exploit major exogenous discontinuities in the maximum duration of unemployment benefits to identify disincentive effects. While confirming strong disincentive effects, it is shown that use of an aggregate hazard function regression model compounds very different and even contradictory effects of the determinants of unemployment.

"In a characteristically combative treatment, Jirjahn (2008a) argues that Addison and
Teixeira's (2006) finding of a negative relationship between works council presence and employment
growth is a chimera produced by the way in which establishment size is measured.
We reject his assertion of misspecification for two reasons; the second of which undoubtedly
contributed to leading Jirjahn astray. And while Jirjahn's treatment is of interest in its own
right, he does a poor job of portraying our overall analysis. Thus, he neglects our treatment of
survival bias while ignoring our presentation of a dynamic labor demand model. Elsewhere he
seems to grudgingly support the former (Jirjahn 2008b), and implicitly to accept our findings
pertaining to employment adjustment (where we report that works councils do not slow the
tortuous pace of employment adjustment in Germany). At root, the thrust of his treatment is
adversarial and his position on the economic effects of works councils over-optimistic. But the
main lesson of Jirjahn's critique is that more work is required of all of us in this area. Issues
raised by the present exchange, apart from the need for a wider set of covariates and longer
time frame, include the selection of firms into collective bargaining and works councils and out
of the system, and the consequences for the raw point estimates. Pending this work, it would be
idle to overstate the robustness of the extant results. We hinted at this in our own treatment in
comparing cross-sectional results with dynamic panel estimates." (author's abstract)

In this study we examine the contribution of severance pay to employment and unemployment development using data on industrialized OECD countries. Our starting point is Lazear?s (1990) empirical dictum that severance payment requirements adversely impact the labor market. We extend his sample period and add to his parsimonious specification a variety of fixed and time-varying labor market institutions. While the positive effect of severance pay on unemployment garners some support, there is no real indication of adverse effects for (the three) other employment outcomes identified here. Moreover, with the possible exception of collective bargaining coordination, the role of institutions is also more muted than suggested in the literature.

This paper uses a unique Portuguese data set to examine the effect of unemployment benefit receipt and maximum duration of benefits on escape rates from unemployment. The focus is on the time profile of transitions out of unemployment. The novel aspect of the study resides in its identification of six destination states, namely, open-ended employment, fixed-term contracts, part-time work, government-provided jobs, self employment, and labor force withdrawal. Strong evidence of disincentive effects of the unemployment benefit system is reported. This result obtains both in general and for the various destination states, among which some marked behavioral differences are detected.

This paper examines the contribution of technological change to changes in the structure of relative employment and wages. Even if the nature of demand-side forces is fairly clear – international trade being of secondary importance because of the modest size of the between-industry employment shifts – the identification of the fundamental causes of skill-biased technological change, the techniques involved, and the manner of their adoption by firms is not transparent. Accordingly the skill-biased technological change diagnosis offers no real blueprint for policy other than the need for an increasingly better-educated labor force. The problems arise when one turns to the here-and-now, that is, the position of the currently skill-disadvantaged. Unfortunately, general solutions, although favored by politicians, are not available. Rather, there seems to be scope for carefully targeted programs that offer successive incremental improvements in the labor market prospects of truly disadvantaged workers whose education, skills and training are a significant impediment to their employment.