EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Impact of Temporary Employment on Labour Productivity: Evidence from an Industry-Level Panel of EU Countries

Domenico Lisi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of less stringent Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) for temporary employment (TE) in EU countries. A reduced form model is estimated to identify the overall effect on labour productivity growth. The advantage of using industry-level data is fourfold. First, as in standard cross-country studies, the cross-country variation of EPL is still exploited. Second, in contrast with the cross-country analysis, the specification allows us to control for unobserved fixed effects, potentially correlated with the level of EPL. Third, as the previous literature emphasised, the within-industry “composition effect” appears to be negligible, allowing us to identify the “independent effect” of TE. Fourth, to the extent that events in a single industry are not able alone to affect the policy in a country, the specification is less subject to the simultaneity problem between variable of interest and policy. The theoretical literature on TE has not established a clear prediction on the sign of the effect, existing different convincing reasons for both directions. Thus, the results of the analysis have potentially important policy implications. Our finding is that the introduction of temporary contracts has a negative, even if small in magnitude, effect on labour productivity growth.

Keywords: labour productivity; temporary employment; EPL; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J24 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09-15
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26076/1/MPRA_paper_26076.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:26076

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:26076