Why Do Firms (Dis)Like Part-Time Contracts?

Francesco Devicienti (), Elena Grinza and Davide Vannoni

No 606, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: This paper investigates the costs for firms of employing women full-time versus part-time in terms of differential hourly wages. To this end, we use administrative matched employer employee data on the universe of female workers in Italy over 33 years and rely on regression models that control for worker, firm, and job match fixed effects, in addition to several worker-, job-, and firm-level time-varying factors. We find that, when a worker switches from a full-time to a part-time contract within the same firm, she benefits from an increase in the hourly wage. Over the last three decades, these wage premiums have significantly reduced, remaining positive and significant up to 2015. We also find that the part-time premium is pervasive and stable across many different labor market segments and independent of workers’ intrinsic productivity levels. These and other findings appear to be compatible with developments in wage bargaining institutions, whereby more generous conditions can be accorded to part-timers. Coupled with the detrimental effect of part-time work on firm productivity documented by Devicienti et al. (2018), our results contribute to explain why firms are often unwilling to concede part-time positions to employees asking for them.

Keywords: Part-time/full-time wage differentials; wage bargaining institutions; multiple fixed-effects regressions; administrative matched employer-employee longitudinal data. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J31 J53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 43
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/no.606.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Why do firms (dis)like part-time contracts? (2020)
Working Paper: Why Do Firms (Dis)Like Part-Time Contracts? (2018)
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:cca:wpaper:606

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().