The impact of mandatory entitlement to paid leave on employment in the UK
Alexander Lembcke
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library
Abstract:
I evaluate the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave (nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. With constant weekly pay this change amounts effectively to an increase in the real hourly wage of about 8.5% for someone going from 0 to 4 weeks paid holiday per year, which should lead to adjustments in employment. For employees I use complementary log-log regression to account for right-censoring of employment spells. I find no increase in the hazard to exit employment within a year after treatment. Adjustments in wages cannot explain this result as they are increasing for the treated groups relative to the control. I also evaluate the long run trend in aggregate employment, using the predicted treatment probabilities in a difference-in-difference framework. Here I find a small and statistically significant decrease in employment. This effect is driven by a trend reversal in employment, coinciding with the treatment.
Keywords: UK Working Time Regulation; Employment and labour regulation; UK LFS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J23 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 80 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60270/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Mandatory Entitlement to Paid Leave on Employment in the UK (2014) 
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:60270
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