Do Firms Demand Temporary Workers When They Face Workload Fluctuation? Cross-Country Firm-Level Evidence

Vanessa Dräger and Paul Marx

ILR Review, 2017, vol. 70, issue 4, 942-975

Abstract: The growth of temporary employment is one of the most important transformations of labor markets in the past decades. Theoretically, firms’ exposure to short-term workload fluctuations is a major determinant of employing temporary workers when employment protection for permanent workers is high. The authors investigate this relationship empirically with establishment-level data in a broad comparative framework. They create two novel data sets by merging 1) data on 18,500 European firms with 2) measures of labor-market institutions for 20 countries. Results show that fluctuations increase the probability of hiring temporary workers by 8 percentage points in countries with strict employment protection laws. No such effect is observed in countries with weaker employment protections. Results are robust to subgroups, subsamples, and alternative estimation strategies.

Keywords: temporary employment; employment protection; labor demand; firm-level data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ilr.sagepub.com/content/70/4/942.abstract (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:ilrrev:v:70:y:2017:i:4:p:942-975

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().