Why does part-time employment increase in recessions?

Daniel Borowczyk-Martins

World of Labour, 2017, No 397, 397

Abstract: The share of workers employed part-time increases substantially in economic downturns. How should this phenomenon be interpreted? One hypothesis is that part-time jobs are more prevalent in sectors that are less sensitive to the business cycle, so that recessionary changes in the sectoral composition of employment explain the increase in part-time employment. The evidence shows, however, that this hypothesis only accounts for a small part of the story. Instead, the growth of part-time work operates mainly through reductions in working hours in existing jobs.

Keywords: part-time work; involuntary; business cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E24 E32 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/397/pdfs/why- ... se-in-recessions.pdf (application/pdf)
https://wol.iza.org/articles/why-does-part-time-em ... crease-in-recessions (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:y:2017:n:397

Access Statistics for this article

World of Labour is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in World of Labour from LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Olga Nottmeyer ().