Flexicurity and self-perceived work–life balance in the EU27: A repeated cross-sectional multilevel analysis

Marina Ferent-Pipas and Dorina Lazar
Additional contact information
Marina Ferent-Pipas: Faculty of Economics and Business Administration – Department of Statistics, Forecasting, Mathematics, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Dorina Lazar: Faculty of Economics and Business Administration – Department of Statistics, Forecasting, Mathematics, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2024, vol. 45, issue 4, 1184-1212

Abstract: This study examines the relationship between flexicurity policies and work–life balance, addressing the research question ‘How do higher flexicurity efforts in a country relate to employee perceptions of work–life balance?’ The European Commission adopted flexicurity in 2007 and proposed employment quality as an expected outcome. Work–life balance, a dimension monitored as part of employment quality, has so far been assumed as an implicit outcome of flexicurity, but no empirical research is dedicated to the topic per se. In this article the authors construct a composite indicator to proxy for national flexicurity efforts following the European Commission’s guidelines. For work–life balance and other individual characteristics, the authors employ data on about 74,000 EU27 employees from the three latest waves of the European Working Conditions Survey. First, findings show that the between-country differences in work–life balance were narrower in 2015 compared to 2005. Second, the multilevel analysis suggests that the higher a country scores as regards its flexicurity policies, the likelier its citizens are to report having a work–life balance.

Keywords: Flexicurity; labor market policy; multilevel regression; quality of work life; work–life balance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X231213024 (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:sae:ecoind:v:45:y:2024:i:4:p:1184-1212

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X231213024

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().