Firms and the Wage Penalty of Temporary Work

Ana Figueiredo, Agnieszka Markiewicz and Elliott Weder

No 26240, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: Using matched employer-employee data from the Netherlands, we decompose the wage penalty of temporary work. Temporary workers earn 28 log points less per hour than permanent workers. Worker fixed effects explain half this gap, while firm pay premia account for 28%. Most of the firm contribution reflects temporary workers sorting into low-paying firms rather than within-firm pay differences. As temporary employment differs substantially across demographic groups, we extend our framework to gender and native-migrant wage gaps, separating contract from firm sorting. Differential exposure to temporary work explains part of the native-migrant firm pay-premia gap but matters little for the gender wage gap.

Keywords: Temporary employment; Firm pay premia; Wage inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/26240.pdf (application/pdf)

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:crm:wpaper:26240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().