Labor Contracts and Flexibility: Evidence from a Labor Market Reform in Spain

Victor Aguirregabiria () and César Alonso-Borrego

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper evaluates the effects on employment, job turnover and productivity of a labor market reform in Spain that eliminated dismissal costs for fixed-term or temporary contracts. Our empirical results are based on a panel of 2356 Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1982-1993. We postulate and estimate a dynamic labor demand model with indefinite and fixed-term labor contracts, and a general structure of labor adjustment costs. Experiments using the estimated model show important positive effects of the reform on total employment (i.e., a 3.5% increase) and job turnover. There is a strong substitution of permanent by temporary workers (i.e., a 10% decline in permanent employment). The effects on labor productivity and the value of a firm are very small. These effects contrast with the ones of a counterfactual reform consisting in halving firing costs of all type of contracts. That policy implies the same increase in total employment, but much larger improvements in productivity, and the value of firms.

Keywords: Labor demand; Firing costs; Temporary contracts; Estimation of dynamic structural models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 C51 J23 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2009-02-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (96)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-346.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: LABOR CONTRACTS AND FLEXIBILITY: EVIDENCE FROM A LABOR MARKET REFORM IN SPAIN (2014)
Working Paper: Labor contracts and flexibility: evidence from a labor market reform in Spain (2009)
Working Paper: Labor contracts and flexibility: evidence from a labor markt reform in Spain (1999)
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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-346

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().