Dual Labor Markets Revisited

Author(s):  
Samuel Bentolila ◽  
Juan J. Dolado ◽  
Juan F. Jimeno

This article provides an overview of empirical and theoretical research on dual labor markets. It revisits the labor-market effects of dual employment protection legislation as well as the main factors behind its resilience. Characterized by a high incidence of temporary contracts, which may lead to stepping-stone or dead-end jobs, dual labor markets exhibit specific features regarding the determination of employment, unemployment, churn, training, productivity growth, wages, and labor market flows. Relying on the contrasting experiences of several OECD countries with different degrees of duality and, in particular, on the very poor employment performance of some EU countries during the Great Recession, lessons are drawn about policy-reform strategies aiming to correct the inefficiencies of dual labor markets.

Author(s):  
James E. Coverdill ◽  
William Finlay

This book examines headhunting—contingency recruiting—in the wake of two profound changes in the labor market. The first is the emergence and explosive rise of various forms of social media, most prominently LinkedIn, which have made information about employers, jobs, and job-seekers much more widely available. The second is the unraveling of internal labor markets and the fraying of the ties between employers and employees, which started in the 1980s and 1990s, and accelerated in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the Great Recession. Both changes created the possibility that employers and candidates would be able to find each other without the benefit of labor-market intermediaries like headhunters. The book explains why headhunting survived these changes: employers still need headhunters to find good candidates quickly. In a high-tech world, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified prospective candidates. Headhunters, however, determine which of these prospects are truly viable candidates and they invest time and effort in converting prospects into candidates. They bring high-touch search to a high-tech labor market.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Svalund

Comparing the Nordic countries, this article examines different combinations of permanent and temporary employment protection legislation, and whether such differences are reflected in patterns of labor market transitions. We find higher levels of transitions from unemployment to temporary contracts in Sweden and Finland, with lax regulation of temporary contracts and strict regulation of permanent contracts. Further, temporary employees are integrated into permanent contracts in countries with lax (Denmark) or strict (Norway) regulation of permanent contracts, while this is not the case in Finland and Sweden. For these countries, the study indicates a certain degree of labor market duality, with low mobility from temporary to permanent employment contracts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan J. Dolado ◽  
Etienne Lalé ◽  
Nawid Siassi

Three features of real‐life reforms of dual employment protection legislation (EPL) systems are particularly hard to study through the lens of standard labor‐market search models: (i) the excess job turnover implied by dual EPL, (ii) the nonretroactive nature of EPL reforms, and (iii) the transition dynamics from dual to a unified EPL system. In this paper, we develop a computationally tractable model addressing these issues. Our main finding is that the welfare gains of reforming a dual EPL system are sizeable and achieved mostly through a decrease in turnover at short job tenures. This conclusion continues to hold in more general settings featuring wage rigidities, heterogeneity in productivity upon matching, and human capital accumulation. We also find substantial cross‐sectional heterogeneity in welfare effects along the transition to a unified EPL scheme. Given that the model is calibrated to data from Spain, often considered as the epitome of a labor market with dual EPL, our results should provide guidance for a wide range of reforms of dual EPL systems.


Author(s):  
Samir Amine ◽  
Wilner Predelus

With emerging economies facing significant lags in the use of information technology to improve their productivity and compete with industrialized economies, the availability of relatively lower-cost labor in the emerging economies is considered a powerful asset that can compensate for their technological disadvantage. However, regulating the labor market often proves to be rather challenging as it is important that a balance be struck between protecting workers and stimulating economic growth. This chapter analyzes the literature on labor market regulations in the emerging economies to observe that the trade-off between employment protection legislation (EPL), job creation, productivity, and innovation often cited in the literature is not conclusive.


2006 ◽  
pp. 122-143
Author(s):  
V. Gimpelson ◽  
R. Kapeliushnikov

The article focuses on diversification and destandartization of employment in the Russian economy. The authors discuss global and objective preconditions for this process but underline a few specific features of the Russian case. The latter are due to the market transition as well as to incomplete and selective enforcement of the excessively restrictive employment protection legislation. This explains high incidence of household-based subsistence farming, underemployment, time-related overemployment, informal employment against low level of formal contracts for fixed-term or part-time employment. Using representative data the authors illustrate all major forms of non-standard employment in Russia that have evolved since 1992.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1458-1476
Author(s):  
Dennis Wesselbaum

This paper documents a puzzling fact, namely that there is a significant negative relation between employment protection legislation and the usage of the intensive margin of labor market adjustments. I make use of a real business cycle model and introduce search and matching frictions as well as adjustment costs along the extensive and the intensive labor market margins. I show that the model is able to replicate the observed patterns of cyclicality, volatility, and especially the behavior of extensive and intensive margins if we assume low firing costs and relatively high hours adjustment costs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esteban Moro ◽  
Morgan R. Frank ◽  
Alex Pentland ◽  
Alex Rutherford ◽  
Manuel Cebrian ◽  
...  

AbstractCities are the innovation centers of the US economy, but technological disruptions can exclude workers and inhibit a middle class. Therefore, urban policy must promote the jobs and skills that increase worker pay, create employment, and foster economic resilience. In this paper, we model labor market resilience with an ecologically-inspired job network constructed from the similarity of occupations’ skill requirements. This framework reveals that the economic resilience of cities is universally and uniquely determined by the connectivity within a city’s job network. US cities with greater job connectivity experienced lower unemployment during the Great Recession. Further, cities that increase their job connectivity see increasing wage bills, and workers of embedded occupations enjoy higher wages than their peers elsewhere. Finally, we show how job connectivity may clarify the augmenting and deleterious impact of automation in US cities. Policies that promote labor connectivity may grow labor markets and promote economic resilience.


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