Is temporary employment a stepping stone for unemployed school leavers?

Christian Göbel and Elsy Verhofstadt

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: Many school-leavers enter the labour market via temporary employment. In this paper we investigate the impact of a temporary employment spell at the start of the career on the transition rate into permanent employment. We compare the case of temporary employment to the hypothetical case of a direct transition from unemployment to permanent employment. In order to control for selective participation in temporary employment we include a large set of explanatory variables which have been especially collected to study school-leavers. We apply the AIC-information criterion to select the appropriate specification for unobserved heterogeneity. Based on the information criteria we conclude that given our data, there is no support for a model with selection in unobserved characteristics. Simulation exercises provide insights into the development of the effect of temporary employment over time. For a sample of unemployed Flemish school-leavers we find that in the short run temporary employment delays the school leaver’s transition to permanent employment. However, in the long run temporary employment acts as a stepping stone and decreases the duration until permanent employment.

Keywords: temporary employment; school leavers; labour market policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J41 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 5 pages
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_08_542.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Temporary Employment a Stepping Stone for Unemployed School Leavers? (2008)
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:rug:rugwps:08/542

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().