Temporary layoffs, short-time work and COVID-19: the case of a dual labour market

This paper examines the type of short-time work schemes implemented in Spain to preserve jobs and worker’s incomes during the COVID-19 crisis. These policies have typically involved some degree of subsidization of payroll taxes for firms and also subsidies to workers. For this purpose, we simulate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 on labor market outcomes. The steady-state results show that the availability of short-time work schemes and temporary layoffs does not necessarily prevent a large increase in unemployment and job destruction. The effects of these measures depend on the degree of subsidization of payroll taxes and on the design of the policy. The heavily subsidized short-time work schemes provide incentives to preserve workers on payroll working very few hours that would not have been employed in the benchmark situation, generating deadweight costs and inefficiencies. The transition exercise shows that a scenario with a moderate degree of subsidization of payroll taxes, and where the subsidy is independent of the reduction in hours worked, is the least harmful for both welfare and fiscal deficit. However, this is not the scenario that maximizes the number of jobs preserved. A more generous short-time work scheme, similar to the one implemented in the first year of the pandemic, accomplishes that goal instead. The drawbacks, though, are fiscal sustainability and deadweight costs. The winners and losers exercise shows that more than 50% of the workers are hit negatively in terms of average income and very few workers are better off after this shock: less than 3% in the scenarios which heavily subsidizes short-time work as a result of this generous work sharing strategy. The category that experiences the strongest distributional changes is the one composed of unemployed workers. In the heavily subsidized short-time work scenarios they are the ones who improve more in terms of the proportion of workers affected and also in terms of the average increase in annual income, but among the losers, they are also the ones who lose more in both respects.