Are Temporary Workers Discriminated Against? Evidence from Europe

Simona Comi and Mara Grasseni

CHILD Working Papers from CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse the wage gap between temporary and permanent jobs in 12 European countries. We use the semi-parametric (quantile regression) approach and evaluate the wage gap across the entire wage distribution. We show that the fixed-term wage gap decreases as higher quantiles are considered, and that having a fixed-term contract penalizes low–skilled workers (at the bottom of the earnings distribution) more than high–skilled ones. Finally, we decompose the wage differential across the entire wage distribution in order to account for the relative importance of observed characteristics versus different returns to skills. We find that workers with the same characteristics as temporary workers would receive higher wages if they worked on permanent contracts in almost all the countries considered, and that this finding is stable across? the entire wage distribution.

Keywords: Temporary jobs; fixed-term contracts; wage differentials; quantile regression; decomposition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpc:wplist:wp17_09

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