Laziness or liberation? Labor market policies and workers' attitudes toward employment flexibility

Lena Hipp and Christopher J. Anderson

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This study examined the relationship between labor market policies and employees' willingness to make concessions in order to avoid unemployment. In contrast to previous work that analyzed the behavior of employers and the unemployed, we examined how labor market policies influence employees' flexibility. Multilevel modeling techniques were applied to a data set that was created by combining individual-level data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) with country-level information from the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development. The main findings of our analyses were that dismissal protection and unemployment benefits do make a difference to employees' willingness to make concessions, and that the relationships between the willingness to make concessions and labor market policies are nonlinear. Substantively, these nonlinear relationships suggest that employees' willingness to be flexible is negatively associated with both "too much" and "too little" social protection.

Keywords: attitudes; flexicurity; international comparison; labor market flexibility; multi-level analysis; Pplicy feedback (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2015-10-14
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in International Journal of Social Welfare, 14, October, 2015, 24(4), pp. 335 - 347. ISSN: 1369-6866

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:101872

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