Temporary Contracts,Employment Protection,and Collective Bargaining

This paper examines the effect of employment protection in a matching model with endogenous job destruction, collective bargaining, and two types of employment contracts. Using this framework, we show that (i) the impact on job creation and job destruction caused by reducing the firing costs associated with temporary jobs depends on the labour unions' bargaining strength and the gap in firing costs between contracts; (ii) reducing the firing costs associated with permanent jobs unambiguously decreases equilibrium unemployment if labour unions have strong bargaining power; and (iii) the impact caused by the firing costs differs between collective and individual bargaining.     

THE INEFFICIENCY OF WORKER TIME USE

Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges' decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.     

Gender Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Ten Advanced Economies

The paper investigates gender unemployment dynamics in 10 advances economies applying a recent methodology on widely available Labour Force Surveys data. We calculate the job finding and separation rates for each gender and use them to construct the steady‐state unemployment gap as well as two counterfactual gender unemployment gaps: one generated by differences only in job finding rates and the other by differences only in separation rates. We find that in all countries the gender unemployment gap attributed to differences in the job finding rate is lower than the gap attributed to differences in the separation rate, suggesting that gender differences in the separation rate are the major factor behind the gender unemployment gap.     

A Level Playing Field: An Optimal Weighting Scheme of Dismissal Protection Characteristics

In collective redundancies, employers are forced to regard certain characteristics when deciding who to dismiss. This paper develops a procedure to derive an empirical‐based weighting scheme between protection characteristics in Germany (age, disability, dependencies, and tenure). Up to now, an objective weighting scheme is missing, and employers bargain with employee's representatives about the weighting of the characteristics. In the suggested procedure, the relationships of the four characteristics with reemployment probabilities and the quality of the new job are estimated. Then, the relevant outcome variable is chosen applying life satisfaction analysis. Finally, based on the empirical results, a weighting scheme for the characteristics is proposed, which serves as a guideline in the process of collective redundancies.     

Is There a Double‐Negative Effect? Gender and Ethnic Wage Differentials in Italy

This paper investigates the gender and ethnic wage differentials for female migrants in Italy by applying the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, with and without Heckman correction, to account for self‐selection into the labour market. The gender wage gap is nearly 15 per cent, more than 60 per cent of which is unexplained by observable differences. The ethnic wage gap is much larger (39 per cent), but endowments explain 53 per cent of the gap. We also estimate the double‐negative effect of being both female and a migrant. A female migrant earns 42 per cent less than an Italian male; the unexplained component is estimated to be 53–65 per cent. Results are robust to different specifications.     

New Firms as Employers: The Wage Penalty for Voluntary and Involuntary Job Switchers

According to previous research, new firms pay lower wages. However, previous studies have been unable to control for the possibility that the opportunity costs of accepting employment at new firms may differ across individuals. In this paper, we investigate whether a wage penalty for being employed at a new firm exists if we take the individual employee's experience and status in the labour market into consideration. We focus on individuals who decide to switch jobs and use matched employee–employer data about all firms and employees in Sweden for the period 1998–2010. Our results show that the share of job transitions into lower wages are higher for those who switch to new firms compared with incumbent firms (40 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively). Our endogenous wage equation estimates indicate that being an involuntary job switcher has an equally negative effect on wages at both new and incumbent firms. However, the positive effect of education on wages is more pronounced for job switchers selecting into incumbent firms.     

What Survey Data Reveal about Price and Wage Rigidity in Portugal

This paper exploits the information collected from a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms to study the patterns of firms’ price and wage adjustments and the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities. The evidence shows that the frequency of price changes varies substantially across sectors and depends on the intensity of competition, the share of labor costs and firms’ price reviewing behavior. The results also suggest that the constraint imposed by the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity is less important in firms where the fraction of permanent and high‐skilled workers is lower and the share of flexible pay components is higher.     

Leadership selection: Can changing the default break the glass ceiling?

Leadership selection often requires candidates to actively choose to express their interest. Using a series of incentivized experiments with more than 1000 participants, we compare such an Opt-in mechanism with an Opt-out mechanism where everyone qualified for the position is in the candidate pool by default, but individuals can choose to opt out of the selection process. The results reveal a gender gap in participation decisions under the Opt-in mechanism. The gender gap exists even when individuals know they are the top performers, suggesting helping women improve their performance may not necessarily reduce gender gaps. Importantly, women are more likely to participate under the Opt-out mechanism and gender gaps in leadership selection are reduced.     

ON FRAGILE GROUNDS: A REPLICATION OF “ARE MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS DIFFERENT IN TERMS OF CULTURAL INTEGRATION?”

This study is a replication of “Are Muslim Immigrants Different in terms of Cultural Integration?” by Alberto Bisin, Eleonora Patacchini, Thierry Verdier and Yves Zenou, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, 6, 445–456, 2008. Bisin et al. (2008) report that they have 5,963 observations in their study. Using their empirical setup, we can only identify 1,901 relevant observations in the original data. After removing missing values we are left with 818 observations. We cannot replicate any of their results and our estimations yield no support for their claims.