The right to strike is protected under both EU and Norwegian law, reflecting the principle that participation in collective action should not have long-term consequences for workers' careers. Following a major strike in 2016, the Norwegian hotel and restaurant sector introduced rights to local wage bargaining, which had previously been negotiated only at the central level. Using Norwegian administrative linked employer-employee data for 2015-2019, we compare outcomes for hotel and restaurant workers with those in retail trade, where wages remained centrally determined. We find that, among workplaces covered by collective agreements, hotel and restaurant workers experienced little change in average wages but increased wage compression at the top. However, the striking workers themselves faced lower hourly wages, weaker labour market attachment, and a higher likelihood of receiving welfare benefits. These findings suggest that, for participants, the strike entailed lasting economic costs beyond those incurred during the dispute itself.
This paper investigates the indirect effects of judicial adminstration (JA) on neighbouring firms operating in southern Italian regions characterised by endemic organised crime. When a mafia-affiliated firm is placed under JA, the sector-specific relational networks it sustained are abruptly severed. Using difference-in-differences estimators, we find negative spillovers on other firms operating within a 10-km radius of the sanctioned enterprise: average cumulative effects of on revenues, on employment, and on value added. Effects intensify with sectoral proximity and attenuate with physical distance, consistent with the disruption of territorially embedded mafia networks.
We investigate age-related human resource management (AR-HRM) practices within SME in Italy. Using firm-level survey data with information on age-related attitudes and practices, we analyze the determinants of age management and outplacement practices, along with the role of collective bargaining. We find that collective bargaining is positively associated with the adoption of AR-HRM practices. Conversely, ageist attitudes towards senior workers reduce the adoption of age management practices, while they support outplacement practices and early retirement.
Representative establishment data reveal that over 60% of German plants covered by collective agreements pay wages above the level stipulated in the agreements, creating a wage cushion between actual and contractual wages. While collective bargaining coverage has fallen over time, the prevalence of wage cushions has increased, particularly in eastern Germany. Cross-sectional and fixed-effects analyses for 2008-2023 indicate that in western Germany the presence of a wage cushion is mainly related to plant profitability, unemployment, and the business cycle. Plants which apply collective agreements at the firm rather than the sectoral level are less likely to have wage cushions since firm-level agreements make it easier to explicitly take firm-specific conditions into account. In eastern Germany, however, the explanatory power of these variables is considerably lower. Against the backdrop of falling bargaining coverage, the increasing prevalence of wage cushions suggests that the traditionally rigid German system of wage determination has become more flexible and differentiated.
Using monthly CPS data from 1992 to 2024, this study examines NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) status among US youth. We analyze how NEET risk relates to demographic, family, and economic factors over the long run. We also track changes in NEET prevalence during the Dotcom Crash, Great Recession, and COVID-19, and test whether postsecondary education's protective effect shifts after downturns. Results show that higher education and income reduce NEET risk, while marriage and parenthood increase it. Downturns affected age groups differently, and education's protective role weakened following the Dotcom Crash and COVID-19.
Digitisation has sparked interest in automated decision making in Public Employment Services (PES). We evaluate an algorithmic profiling model in Austria that predicts the reemployment prospects of unemployed individuals to classify and assign them to active labour market policies. Our analysis shows that reallocating resources from jobseekers with low to medium prospects, as proposed by the PES, does not yield the expected efficiency gains. We find no systematic evidence that programmes are less effective for individuals with low predicted employment prospects than for those with medium prospects. These findings caution against crude algorithmic profiling and highlight the need for nuanced targeting strategies that prioritise the most disadvantaged jobseekers.JEL Classification: J24, J64, J68
We examine the impact of parenthood on labor market outcomes for men and women in Italy. We perform two analyses. First, we use a fixed effects framework to examine the impact of marriage and childbearing on labor market outcomes separately for men and women. Then, we follow the child penalty approach to examine the total impact of childbearing on gender inequality. We find that childbirth leads to lower employment and earnings for women with little change for men. These impacts increase with the number of children. Overall, having a child leads to a 39.1% decrease in female employment, a 12.2% increase in part-time work, and a 33% decline in income over the following 10 years relative to (non-significant) changes for men.
This paper exploits exogenous shifts in work organisation during the Covid-19 pandemic to study the implications of hybrid and remote work arrangements on occupational safety. Combining accident registers and household survey microdata from Hungary, we are able to address potential selection and reporting bias, and reliably identify the relevant mechanisms at play. Three novel findings emerge from our study. First, the pandemic had a strong positive effect on work safety: the number and equivalised incidence of work-related accidents decreased by 16% and 11% on average. Second, these gains were unevenly distributed: workers in relatively safe occupations experienced larger reductions in accident hazards, further amplifying existing inequalities in the labour market. Third, the rapid expansion of telework was the main driver of these changes, operating mainly through compositional shifts from high-risk traditional to low-risk remote work arrangements within jobs. Remarkably, the safety benefits of telework did not emerge from more secure work organisation in the home but through foregone injuries typically sustained during ancillary work-related activities such as lunch breaks, mobility routines and other errands around the workplace. Taken together, these results suggest that hybrid and remote work arrangements can be effective tools to promote occupational health and safety, though further research is needed to fully understand the broader externalities involved.
The present paper provides an overall framework to afford the problem of non-representativeness and non-random selectivity arising from online job ads data, using Generalized sample selection models and Eurostat benchmark data. We jointly model the outcome intensity (number of online job ads in observed profiles, whose levels are defined by auxiliary variables) and the probability of endogenous selection (likelihood that online job ads are not missing in a given profile), allowing us to model the missing data mechanism without the need of a priori justification of missingness at random, as generally supposed by multilevel regression and post-stratification, a popular benchmark technique in this field. Moreover, we offer new post-stratification strategies to calibrate the unconditional predictions on benchmark/reference samples. We use data from the Cedefop's Skill Ovate platform collecting online job advertisements for all EU regions in 2022 and an Italian web-platform during 2013Q2-2018Q2, whereas as reference samples, aggregated LFS recent job starters and LFS new hires from microdata that represent reasonable lower bounds for job advertisements. Online job ads present a strong overrepresentation with respect to benchmark data (+40% with respect to LFS recent job starters and +400% over new hires from LFS microdata), whereas generalized sample selection models reduced this bias by half, unlike Multilevel post-stratification and other univariate approaches, which furthermore resulted in bias.
This paper examines how exporting firms, gender, and family commitments interact to shape wage disparities. Using Finnish matched employer-employee data, we estimate wage equations that control for firm, worker, and match-specific unobservables. While exporting firms do not exhibit a wider gender wage gap overall, women with young children face additional short-run wage penalties, as shown by an event-study analysis that reveals a temporary but pronounced gap in the early post-childbirth years. These penalties are concentrated in occupations with greater temporal rigidity and limited scheduling flexibility, highlighting workplace flexibility constraints as a key mechanism. The findings suggest that the interaction between export-related temporal demands and caregiving responsibilities contributes to gendered wage dynamics. These results also raise questions about the continuing relevance of gender norms that disadvantage female employees, even in a context with strong public support for parental leave and childcare in Finland.
In this paper, I study which is the trade-off that workers face when accepting a wage cut after a job-to-job (JTJ) transition. Using data from the Chilean Unemployment Insurance (UI) registry, I show that JTJ transitions are positively associated with ex-post wage growth. Besides, conditional on a JTJ transition, workers who accept wage cuts show higher wage growth rates in their destination firms. I rationalize these findings in a parsimonious job search model that features exogenous wage-wage growth offers. Workers maximize the expected present value of moving JTJ or staying in their current firm when a job offer arrives. The model is calibrated in order to replicate most stylized facts documented in the empirical section and, through comparative statics exercises, the model highlights the relevance of the layoff probability, the correlation of wage levels and growth rates within a job offer, the value of unemployment and the offered -ratio in explaining some of the observed labor market and wage dynamics. The evidence that I provide suggests that, even though a JTJ transition implies a wage cut, workers may also enjoy higher continuation values in their new job.
This paper studies the effects of skills training courses on the labour market outcomes of unemployed workers in the north-east of Italy. We find a positive effect of about 5-6 percentage points in the share of days employed. This effect persists into the fourth year after the beginning of the course and is driven especially by participants younger than 30. From a methodological viewpoint, following Angrist & Rokkanen, we argue that the set-up is equivalent to a randomised controlled trial, given that the criterion which determines admission to the course is unrelated to the outcomes of interest.
For decades, there has been a persistent gap between the working hours employees want and the hours they actually work. Although policies have been introduced to strengthen employees' legal rights to adjust their working hours, many still struggle with working too many or too few hours. A matching and searching model has been developed to explain how negotiations between workers and firms influence these mismatches. Increasing workers' bargaining power is not a panacea, as it may shift the problem from overwork to underwork. The difference between desired and actual working hours decreases when workers and firms have equal negotiating power.
This study investigates the effects of Sweden's 2007 payroll tax reform. The research uniquely analyzes both job creation (extensive margin effects) and increased work hours for incumbent employees (intensive margin effects), which previous studies have largely overlooked. Our results show that, on average per firm, the reform led to 1.4 new full-time employees, 0.6 new part-time employees, and a substantial rise in work hours equivalent to 1.9 full-time employees per firm. Total effects are roughly twice as large as in similar studies failing to take the intensive margin into account. These findings emphasize the broader impact of payroll tax reforms, highlighting the importance of considering both extensive and intensive margin employment effects in future research and policy decisions.
Based on French company data, we assess the hiring of different education profiles of industrial researchers in corporate R&D departments. First, our results show engineers are more likely to be recruited in corporate R&D that develops a patent-oriented strategy; PhD-holders are more likely to be recruited in firms that compete at the technological frontier and in companies that maintain close links with academia and public research. Second, new results reveal the endogamy of industrial researchers' recruitment based on the specifics of their scientific human capital and highlight the mitigating role of hybrid scientific human capital.
This study explores the behavior of female workers in Japan regarding labour market participation using a search and matching model with endogenous participation, heterogeneous productivity and variable participation costs. The model containing variable participation costs enables us to capture how women's market attachment responds to employment-enhancing policies. Key findings include: (i) employed women in Japan tend to leave the labour market and become non-participants from the social efficiency perspective; (ii) policies supporting female participation improve social welfare but do not necessarily enhance workforce attachment; (iii) improved matching efficiency boosts employment and welfare but decreases female labour attachment.
This paper evaluates how firm-specificity of apprenticeship training, equivalently firm-specificity, moderates the response of the demand for apprentices to the unemployment rate. We first present a simplified conceptual framework to illustrate mechanisms through which this moderating effect could occur. We then empirically analyse the impact of unemployment on the demand for apprentices, and the abovementioned moderating effect. Using Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood methodology, we exploit monthly variation in the unemployment rate within sectors and cantons. We find that the unemployment rate is insignificantly associated with the demand for apprentices overall during the COVID19 period in Switzerland. We subsequently use a firm-level survey conducted before COVID19 to construct three measures of firm-specificity. Using each measure, firm-specificity significantly moderates the effect of the unemployment rate on the demand for apprentices. A rise in the unemployment rate statistically and economically significantly reduces the demand for apprentices for firms imparting less firm-specific training. On the other hand, a rise in the unemployment rate statistically and economically insignificantly affects the demand for apprentices within firms imparting more firm-specific training. Our results are robust to the use of multiple measures of firm-specificity and to the inclusion of controls capturing exposure to the pandemic and its economic support measures.
What causes unemployment to concentrate among the same workers over time, and what are the welfare consequences? I demonstrate that unemployment scarring emerges naturally in a frictional labor market when firms with lower-productivity matches have smaller profit margins to absorb negative shocks. I develop a search model with endogenous job termination that reproduces two key empirical regularities: lower-wage jobs are less stable and previous unemployment predicts future job loss. The model captures a crucial non-monotonic pattern I document empirically, where termination risk drops sharply in the left tail of the wage distribution but flattens beyond the median wage. This mechanism increases lifetime wage and unemployment inequality by 7% compared to models with uniform termination risk. Counterfactual experiments reveal that unemployment insurance reduces scarring by enabling workers to wait for higher-quality matches, but simultaneously strengthens workers' bargaining position, which counterintuitively decreases job security at every productivity level.
Engaging in self-employment after retiring is rising. Many governments perceive this as a strategy for extending working lives. Based on the employability perspective, this study examines human capital over an individual's lifespan associated with engagement in self-employment after retiring. Specific human capital factors were examined using a time-discrete event history analysis based on panel data with seven waves (N = 4.538 retirees). The results show that education and work experience are relatively effective for predicting self-employment after retiring. Most demographic factors of human capital were not significant in predicting postretirement engagement. Thus, a broader perspective is suggested for future research.
