Are Married Women in Turkey More Likely to Become Added or Discouraged Workers?

Abstract. The purpose of this study is to examine the labour market outcomes of married couples to find out which of the added and discouraged worker effects is dominant in urban Turkish families. Using household labour force survey and province‐level data from 1988 and 1994, we look for evidence regarding the dependency of the labour force participation decisions of wives and the employment status of their husbands. On yearly and pooled samples of married couples in their prime ages, bivariate probit estimates indicate that the two decisions are negatively correlated. However, the correlation is found to be statistically significant only in the economic crisis year of 1994. We interpret this finding to mean that the added worker effect dominates the discouraged worker effect.     

Earning While Learning: When and How Student Employment is Beneficial

Although studies of student employment (‘earning while learning’) mostly find positive wage effects, they do not adequately consider the relation of the employment to the field of study. We investigate how different types of student employment during tertiary education affect short‐ and long‐term labour market returns. Beyond examining differences between non‐working and part‐time working students, we distinguish between student employment related and unrelated to the field of study. Our results show significant positive labour market returns of ‘earning while learning’ only for student employment related to the field of study. These returns consist of a lower unemployment risk, shorter job‐search duration, higher wage effects, and greater job responsibility.     

New Mothers’ Labour Force Participation in Italy: The Role of Job Characteristics

Abstract. In this paper we use newly available individual‐level data from the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households to investigate the factors associated with female labour force participation after the birth of the first child. We focus on the role of pre‐marital job characteristics and find that new mothers who worked without a contract are less likely to participate, while those who worked in the public sector or in a large private firm have a higher probability of being in the labour force after childbearing. We suggest that these effects could be at least partly attributed to differences in the level of job protection and employment stability enjoyed by workers. This implies that in Italy women with highly protected and stable jobs might find it easier to combine career and family, whereas those who are less sheltered by the legislation might be more likely to be inactive after becoming mothers.     

The Incidence of Household Characteristics on Labour Decisions: The Case of Spain

Abstract. This work presents an approach to the analysis of the incidence of family relationships on individuals' labour decisions as well as on their position in the labour market. We follow two different analyses. Firstly, we attempt to identify the type of households which are the most characteristic in our society to select the main categories of those where most people live, in order to study the decisions about participation in labour markets as well as the incidence of unemployment upon them. The second analysis tries to implement a model to allow us to study the implications of living in a partnership and the probability of both members of a couple having the same labour market status. There are at least two relevant results: the first shows the important concentration of unemployment in households of a couple with adult children and is clearly related to youth and female unemployment and the necessity of political intervention to correct them. The second points out the dependence between the labour status of the couple, mainly when they have a low level of education. Nevertheless, the woman is usually inactive, although this situation tends to change the younger she is, in which case the highest probability is that both members of the couple are employed.     

Regional Labour Market Adjustment: Are Positive and Negative Shocks Different?

This paper analyses regional labour market adjustment in the Finnish provinces during 1971–96. It investigates the interrelations of employment, unemployment and labour force participation to examine how a change in labour demand is adjusted to. The study questions the usual assumption that positive and negative shocks evoke similar adjustment processes. Instead, we test for the possibility that the effects of positive and negative shocks are asymmetric. The analysis reveals that there is little asymmetry in the adjustment to region‐specific labour demand shocks, but adjustment to total (region‐specific plus common component) shocks displays more asymmetry. The region‐specific component of a labour demand shock has short‐lived effects on unemployment and participation, and its effect on employment is very small but permanent [persistent?]. Initially, most of the fall in employment is absorbed by the unemployment and participation rate, but after a few years migration plays a larger role in the adjustment process.     

Temporary Workers in Italy: Who Are They and Where They End Up

Abstract. Temporary work has been an important component of employment growth in Italy since the early 1990s. This paper focus upon labour market transitions of temporary workers in order to test whether temporary work enhances the subsequent labour market chances. We use propensity score matching to compare subsequent employment outcomes of people who have recently acquired a temporary job with those of people who remained unemployed. Individuals' hetero geneity explains a good amount of the raw differences in the subsequent labour market status of temporary workers and the comparison group. Yet there appears to be a sizable net gain from experiencing a temporary work. Our benchmark average estimate is a 30 percentage points rise in the ‘satisfactory employment’ chances 1 year after the start of the temporary work experience. The net gains are the largest for females and adult people and the areas with low unemployment; moreover, gains are the largest for the most recent years in our sample and for those people who were (according to the propensity score estimates) either least or most likely to exit from unemployment.     

Women's Career Development and Divorce Risk in Japan

ABSTRACT In Japan, divorce rates have more than doubled since the mid-1960s, and female paid employment has increased rapidly in the past few decades. By applying a conventional economic model of labor force participation to micro-level data gathered from a nationally representative sample survey, this paper shows that Japanese married women who have contemplated divorcing their husbands are more likely to participate in the workforce as full-time paid employees. This finding suggests that an increasing risk of divorce has made a substantial contribution to the fast rise in Japanese women's participation in paid employment, particularly full-time work.     

Women’s Employment Status and Hours Employed in Urban Brazil: Does Husbands’ Presence Matter?

The determinants of hours worked for employed women in developing countries is a little‐studied topic. We compare the determinants of employment with the determinants of hours worked for prime‐aged urban Brazilian women with and without husbands present. Given employment status, we find systematic differences for women in couple‐headed and female‐headed households. For the former, the same variables that affect employment do a good job of explaining hours worked. In contrast, our model generally fails to capture determinants of variation in hours worked for women who are sole heads of households. Sample selectivity functions in opposite directions for the two groups.     

The Role of Entrepreneurship in the Context of Career Trajectories: Moving Back into Wage Employment or into Unemployment?

This study investigates patterns of movement from self‐employment to wage employment or to unemployment in Belgium. Non‐parametric techniques and complimentary log–log analyses are used to determine the significance of stable individual traits (e.g. gender) and of time‐dependent characteristics (e.g. family and organizational context, labour market mobility) in moving back to wage employment or to unemployment. Evidence is provided on the possibility of entrepreneurship acting as a ‘steppingstone’ between long‐term unemployment and paid work. Yet, significant relationships also emerge between ex‐ante time spent in unemployment and the possibility of continued unemployment upon self‐employment exit.     

Dropping the Books and Working Off the Books

The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy, a country ranking badly in both respects when compared with other high‐income economies, with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers, we exploit the information on individuals' social security positions available from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth. After controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic and economic variables and addressing potential endogeneity and selection issues, we show that a low level of education sizeably and significantly increases the probability of working underground. Switching from completing compulsory school to graduating at college more than halves this probability for both men and women. The gain is slightly higher for individuals completing the compulsory track with respect to those having no formal education at all. The different probabilities found for self‐employed and dependent workers support the view of a dual informal sector, in which necessity and desirability coexist.     

Youth Unemployment and Opportunities in the Labour Market – The Myth of Lifelong Hysteresis

This paper examines whether the level of risk of unemployment for recently trained youths in the labour market has lasting effects upon their employment opportunities: will a cohort that enters the labour market during a period of high unemployment have a permanently higher rate of unemployment than one that joins the labour market during a period of low unemployment? The connection between occupational choice and employment status after graduation is also examined The analysis encompasses teachers, engineers and unskilled workers. The conclusion is that troughs and highs in the labour market have a significant but not necessarily permanent effect upon unemployment and placement in different industries.     

Crime and Labour Market Opportunities in Italy (1993–2002)

Abstract. This paper investigates the relationship between labour market conditions and crime in Italy accounting for both age and gender in the unemployment measure and considering regional disparities between the North‐Centre and the South of Italy. Using regional data over the period 1993–2002, we study the impact of wages and unemployment on different types of crime. To mitigate omitted variables bias, we control extensively for demographic and socio‐economic variables. Empirical results suggest that unemployment has a large and positive effect on crime rates in southern regions. Our results are robust to model specification, endogeneity, changes in the classification of crimes, and finally, to alternative definitions of unemployment.     

Employment Transitions after Motherhood in Spain

Abstract. This paper investigates transitions from employment to non‐employment and downward occupational mobility after motherhood in Spain. Around 40 per cent of Spanish women who were at work 1 year before childbearing leave employment, most permanently, and one‐third of these exits move to unemployment. The probability of staying on at work after birth is reduced with the rise of fixed‐term contracts and increased with experience and level of education. Downward occupational mobility is not common amongst women remaining employed since they do not switch to part‐time jobs.     

Evaluating the Dynamic Effects of Active Labour Policies in Italy

Abstract. This paper analyses whether active labour market policies (ALMPs) have differing effects on unemployment and employment dynamics according to the particular region in which they are implemented. To this end, it analyses alternative theoretical and econometric models thought to capture the possible effects of active labour market policies on labour force dynamics. The econometric methodologies implemented are the generalized method of moment (GMM) and the panel vector autoregression (P‐VAR). The evidence yielded by the GMM models suggests that the effects of different ALMPs on unemployment are dissimilar across the Italian regions. It follows that some active programmes are likely to have a greater effect in the South than in the North. The results of the P‐VAR models estimated are synthesized by impulse response analysis and forecast error variance decomposition. The impulse response analysis suggests that an increase in total ALMP gives rise to: (i) a decrease in the unemployment rate; and (ii) a significant increase in labour force participation. More interestingly, the results obtained from the error variance decomposition analysis show that unemployment movements are not driven by shocks in the ALMPs and that, especially in the northern regions, atypical contracts shocks account for a substantial portion of unemployment dynamics.     

Tax Structure and Female Labour Supply: Evidence from Ireland

How great an effect does the structure of income taxes have on female labour supply? This issue is investigated using a discrete‐choice static labour supply model for married couples in Ireland. The model incorporates fixed costs of working and simultaneously explains participation decisions and preferred hours of work. The model is estimated using data from the 1994 wave of the Living in Ireland Survey. Simulations examine the labour supply effects of introducing greater independence in the tax treatment of married couples, compared with an income‐splitting system, and alternative forms of tax cuts.     

EQUILIBRIUM SEARCH UNEMPLOYMENT,ENDOGENOUS PARTICIPATION,AND LABOR MARKET FLOWS

The sustainability of welfare states requires high employment and high participation to raise the tax base. To analyze labor supply in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a macro model of the labor market with unemployment and labor force participation as endogenous and distinct states. In our world, workers' decisions of participating are determined by an entry decision and an exit decision. A calibration of the model improves the usual representations of labor markets, since it quantitatively accounts for the observed flows between employment and nonparticipation. The paper investigates also the effect of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits on participation decisions. Taxes reduce entries and increase exits, whereas unemployment benefits, at a given job‐finding rate, raise entries and have ambiguous effects on exits. (JEL: J2, J6)     

Unemployment Components in the G7 Countries

The increase in unemployment rates in the G7 countries is broken down into both labour supply and labour demand components. In no case is there a dominant source. Real GDP generally ranks first but does not account for more than a third of the overall changes. This finding shows that unemployment cannot be equated to negative employment since the labour force is generally increasing and volatile, mostly because of rising participation rates. Another reason why unemployment is not a reliable indicator of macroeconomic performance is that labour hoarding reduces employment response to output changes; this is especially true for Japan and Europe.     

The Cyclical Volatility of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies: Evidence From Italy

In this study, we explore the fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies in the Italian labour market over the last 20 years. Relying on the available sources of data for unfilled job openings, we find that even in Italy, similarly to other developed countries, there is a clean evidence of the unemployment volatility puzzle. In other words, we empirically assess that the tightness indicator is significantly more volatile than productivity over the whole period. In addition, on the theoretical ground, we show that a matching model with segmented labour markets and on‐the‐job search has the potential to provide a rationale for this pattern.     

Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity and Gender

We test whether there are gender differences in downward rigidity, using Kahn's histogram‐location method and longitudinal registry data on all formally employed persons from the Estonian Tax and Customs Board. The results show that women resist pay cuts less than men. Also, in circumstances of increasing unemployment women's opposition to pay cuts decreases substantially, whereas men's attitudes towards pay cuts are not significantly affected by labour market conditions.     

Effects of Regional Labour Markets on Migration Flows,by Education Level

European economies display large variations in unemployment rates across regions as well as between education groups. Insufficient labour mobility is widely believed to contribute to higher regional disparities and overall unemployment, but few studies have compared mobility responses of different education groups to regional shocks. This paper employs administrative registers covering the entire Norwegian population to compute annual time series from 1994 to 2004 of migration flows and regional labour market conditions by education level for 90 travel‐to‐work areas. We find that regional disparities in unemployment rates are decreasing in education level, whereas the response of migration flows to regional unemployment shocks is increasing in education level. The results suggest that low regional mobility of low‐educated workers may contribute to higher regional disparities and higher overall unemployment among the low educated.