Rather than decrease firing costs across the board, a number of European countries have allowed firms to hire workers on fixed-duration contracts. At the end of a given duration, these contracts can be terminated at little or no cost. If workers are kept on however, the contracts become subject to regular firing costs. We argue in this paper that the effects of such a partial reform of employment protection may be perverse. The main effect may be high turnover in fixed-duration jobs, leading in turn to higher, not lower, unemployment. And, even if unemployment comes down, workers may actually be worse off, going through many spells of unemployment and fixed duration jobs, before obtaining a regular job. Looking at French data for young workers since the early 1980s, we conclude that the reforms have substantially increased turnover, without a substantial reduction in unemployment duration. If anything, their effect on welfare of young workers appears to have been negative.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
8219.
Length: Date of creation: Apr 2001 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8219
Note: EFG Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Find related papers by JEL classification: J60 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - General J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.