Unemployment and Temporary Jobs in the Crisis: Comparing France and Spain

Samuel Bentolila, Pierre Cahuc, Juan Dolado and Thomas Le Barbanchon

No 2010-07, Working Papers from FEDEA

Abstract: Our goal here is to explain the strikingly different response of Spanish unemployment relative to other European economies, in particular France, during the ongoing recession. The Spanish unemployment rate, which fell from 22% in 1994 to 8% in 2007, reached 19% by the end of 2009, whereas the French unemployment rate has only increased by less than 2 pp. during the crisis. We argue that labor market institutions in the two economies are rather similar, except for the larger gap between dismissal costs of workers with permanent and temporary contracts in Spain, which lead to huge flows of temporary workers out of and into unemployment. We estimate in a counterfactual scenario that more than one-half of the increase in the unemployment rate would have been avoided had Spain adopted French employment protection institutions before the recession started.

Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/dt/2010/dt-2010-07.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:fda:fdaddt:2010-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from FEDEA
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carmen Arias ().