Labour market policies and social inequality in labour market outcomes

Thomas Biegert

Chapter 33 in Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Advanced Democracies, 2023, pp 479-494 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Labour market policies shape how labour market outcomes are distributed across social groups. This chapter discusses theoretical perspectives on how labour market policies might cause greater or lesser inequality in employment, job quality, and earnings between social groups as characterized by their gender, education, age, or ethnicity. The chapter focuses first on the ‘unified theory’, which largely holds that most policy interference with the functioning of the labour market has detrimental outcomes, the brunt of which is born by those groups with lower human capital. It contrasts this perspective with the dualization literature, which does not deny positive impacts of labour market policies overall but highlights how they can create greater inequality between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. After contrasting these approaches with the existing evidence, the chapter argues that further research should build on theories of institutional complementarities and contextual moderation as developed for instance in the Varieties of Capitalism literature.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800880887.00045 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20451_33

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().